Days after securing a massive majority in the Madhya Pradesh Assembly elections, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Wednesday kickstarted the BJP’s campaign for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections from State Congress president Kamal Nath’s bastion Chhindwara.
Chhindwara is the only Lok Sabha seat out of 29 in the State that the Congress had won in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, while the BJP had bagged 28.
Addressing an event of party workers and women beneficiaries of his government’s flagship Ladli Behna Scheme, Mr. Chouhan said, “Today, we are starting Madhya Pradesh’s mission 29.”
Mr. Chouhan said that in the just concluded Assembly elections, he had worked 20-22 hours every day with only two hours of sleep. “The same way, I will leave no stone unturned [during the Lok Sabha polls],” he said, asking the crowd to help the BJP win all 29 seats in the State and ensure a third term for Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Centre.
After the BJP won the Assembly polls by securing 163 out of 230 seats, question remains who will be the next Chief Minister of the State as the party had not projected Mr. Chouhan as its face this time around. The party, however, failed to win any of the seven Assembly seats in Chhindwara district.
It is being speculated that the party will pick a face keeping the Lok Sabha polls in mind.
Earlier on Tuesday, Mr. Chouhan had said that he had not been a contender for the Chief Minister post.
“I had not been a contender for the Chief Minister earlier, nor am I one today. As a party worker, I have always carried out whatever work the BJP had assigned me to the best of my ability, with dedication and honesty,” he had said in a video message posted on X.
While several BJP leaders, some of them contenders for the Chief Minister post, have been in New Delhi and are meeting Central leaders, Mr. Chouhan has stayed put in the State.
In Chhindwara, Mr. Chouhan dedicated the BJP’s win to the people of the State, especially the women, who he calls his sisters.
Booth-level campaign
Earlier on Monday, just a day after the Assembly poll results, Madhya Pradesh BJP chief V. D. Sharma had said that the party would run a booth-level campaign to take the party’s vote share to 51% at each booth in the Lok Sabha polls.
He had said that under the “Har booth par Modi [Modi on each booth]” campaign, the party would analyse the booths where it lost or won with a narrow margin and work to increase the vote share by 10% there.
“[In the Assembly polls, Union Home Minister] Amit Shah ji had given us the task of achieving 51% vote share and we were able to reach 49% [in the State]. Now, we will work to complete this task in the Lok Sabha polls,” he had said.
