Bhopal: Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) national general secretary Kailash Vijayavargiya is leading by 28,000 votes over the Congress’s billionaire candidate Sanjay Shukla in Indore-1 assembly constituency.
Vijayavargiya had voiced his surprise and reluctance at being nominated to fight the election.
The constituency has 3.63 lakh registered voters and has recorded 34,000 first-time voters. It also has a migrant population of over 1 percent.
Among the BJP’s big guns in this election, Vijayvargiya had told voters in the run-up to the election that he wasn’t gunning to be just an MLA and that he is poised for a larger role in the party.
This victory comes at a time when the BJP, seemingly to be looking beyond Shivraj Singh Chouhan as its chief ministerial candidate, has fielded seven sitting MPs — including three union ministers — apart from Vijayvargiya.
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‘Outsider’
While campaigning for the election, Congress’s Sanjay Shukla had repeatedly used Vijayvargiya’s image as a national leader to call him an outsider and a ‘neta who will not win’.
Significantly, the BJP national secretary is a registered voter in the adjoining Indore-2.
In contrast, Shukla has projected himself to be the “beta” (son) of the constituency. Addressing reporters earlier in the day, he said he was confident that the Congress will secure 140 seats of the state’s 230 assembly seats.
“We gave 18 years to the BJP in power, but after the Congress government came to power in 2018, the BJP bought the MLAs and since then have done no work, except make recovery,” Shukla told reporters in Bhopal, where he was scheduled to meet Madhya Pradesh Congress chief Kamal Nath.
On his part, Vijayvargiya, who has bought a house in the assembly constituency to show he was now a resident, had previously called his rival “politically immature”. Brushing aside predictions that it would be a tight contest, he told ThePrint that the people of Indore had always stood behind him.
“The BJP will form a government not just in Madhya Pradesh but in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh as well,” Vijayvargiya told reporters Saturday.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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