New Delhi: After making a clean sweep in the Karnataka Assembly polls, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge wanted to repeat the same feat in the ensuing assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh. Hence, he reportedly will set a target of 150/230 seats in the assembly polls for the state team when he will review the preparations on Monday. “The party chief has called a meeting of the MP team on May 29. AICC office bearers, PCC office bearers and senior leaders will attend the review meeting,” AICC in charge of MP JP Agarwal told ETV Bharat.
The meeting is significant as it will be the first interaction that Kharge will have with the AICC and the PCC team after taking over as party chief in October 2022. Kharge had recently appointed four new AICC secretaries to assist Agarwal given the size of the state. They are Shiv Bhatia, Subash Chopra, Sanjay Kapoor and Sanjay Dutt.
Besides former Chief Minister and incumbent PCC chief Kamal Nath, former Chief Minister Digvijay Singh, former PCC chief Arun Yadav, Kantilal Bhuria, Suresh Pachauri and Ajay Singh are expected to attend the May 29 review meeting. The Congress won 114 seats, the BJP 109 and BSP 2 in 2018. Kamal Nath, who was the then PCC chief, had become the Chief Minister. But, this had miffed senior leader Jyotiraditya Scindia, who was campaign committee chief in 2018 and had aspirations to become the Chief Minister.
Also read: MP: Nath calls Scindia 'politically redundant'; confident of Cong win in state polls
Later, Scindia left Congress to join the BJP in 2020 and played a role in the fall of the Kamal Nath government due to his influence over a section of MLAs. This time, Kharge wants to set a target of 150/230 seats for the MP team, much above the halfway mark of 116, so that the party forms a government with a comfortable majority and can withstand the BJP’s pulls and pressures. A similar target of 150/224 seats had been given to the state team in Karnataka, above the halfway mark of 113 and the party won 135.
Like in Karnataka where Kharge presented the duo of PCC chief DK Shiv Kumar and CLP leader K Siddaramaiah as a team, the party's high command hopes to benefit from the Digvijay Singh-Kamal Nath combo already working on the ground. “Digvijay Singh has publicly supported Kamal Nath as the party’s Chief Ministerial face. They are both working hard, along with other senior leaders, to bring the party back to power. The AICC secretaries, too, are travelling across the state to prepare the local teams for the upcoming polls. There is visible public anger against the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government in the state,” AICC secretary Sanjay Kapoor told ETV Bharat.
Like in Karnataka, the Congress high command is banking on a slew of social welfare guarantees to win over the youth, women and middle-class voters in MP. Accordingly, the campaign will focus on local issues and the alleged corruption in the Chouhan government. “They formed a government in 2020 through corrupt means and have been indulging in corrupt practices. The youth have no jobs and the farmers are suffering. The people are suffering from high prices of essential food commodities. We will win more seats this time,” Kapoor added.
