Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): The Congress has so far announced 22 candidates for 29 Lok Sabha seats in the state.
As the Congress has given one seat to its alliance partner, the Samajwadi Party, it is yet to declare contestants for six more constituencies.
Those who have so far been given tickets indicate that the party has tried to put up a little fight in some seats. But in a few constituencies, the Congress contenders seem weaker than their BJP counterparts.
As many Congress candidates are confined only to their assembly seats, they are encountering a major problem – the voters in the Lok Sabha constituencies hardly recognise them.
The candidates, like Arun Shrivastava (Bhopal), Akshay Kanti Bam (Indore), Samrat Saraswat (Balaghat), Guddu Raja Bundela (Sagar), Rajendra Malviya (Dewas), Porlal Kharte (Khargone), Pankaj Ahirwar (Tikamgarh) and Radheyshyam Muwel (Dhar), are among those Lok Sabha candidates considered weaker than their rivals.
The Congress will put its strength behind these candidates. Some of these candidates were seeking tickets for the assembly election.
But as their names did not figure in the survey conducted to select candidates for the assembly election, they were not made candidates.
Apart from that, there were other political reasons for not giving them tickets.
The voter-candidate gap
The Congress has fielded them, for it lacked contestants for the Lok Sabha election, but the problem they are encountering is that they voters do not know them.
Arun Shrivastava was president from rural area in Bhopal. He is well-known among the Congress workers in the rural area, but he does not have control over the partymen of the city unit.
Bam is also facing the same problem. Before the assembly election he sought a ticket from the constituency number four in Indore, but he did not get it. Now he has been asked to contest the Lok Sabha election. The voters of Indore are not acquainted with him.
Bundela, who is contesting from Sagar, is not a native of Madhya Pradesh. He wanted a ticket from the Khurai assembly constituency. Instead of giving him a ticket for the assembly election, Bundela has been asked to fight the Lok Sabha election.
Saraswat is a member of the Balaghat district Panchayat. Once his father was an MLA. He has some popularity in the rural areas of Balaghat, but the urban voters are barely acquainted with him.
Muwel, who has been given a ticket for the Lok Sabha election from Dhar, sought a ticket from the Manawar assembly constituency. Likewise, candidate for the Tikamgarh Lok Sabha constituency, Ahirwar, was seeking a ticket from Jatara assembly constituency. But because these three candidates were considered weak, they were not given tickets.
Against this backdrop, the party may have to work harder for these candidates.
