Nagpur : In a radius of about 200 kilometres from this central Indian city, supposedly the location of the zero mile stone of India, the fate of five heavyweight parliamentary politicians is at stake when the polls take place on April 12.
It begins from Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh where the union minister for parliamentary affairs Kamalnath is seeking his tenth successive re-election, traverses to Bhandara where the Nationalist Congress Party heavyweight and union heavy industries minister Praful Patel is looking for a fifth Lok Sabha term, comes to Ramtek, the constituency that once sent the former prime minister P V Narasimha Rao, to Parliament, and now is the battleground for Mukul Wasnik who still retains the reputation of being the youngest MP when debuted in 1984, moves on to Nagpur, where the former BJP president Nitin Gadkari is challenging another Congress veteran Vilas Muttemwar, and ends with Wardha that is witnessing the young Sagar defend his father Datta Meghe’s turf.
Add the fact that the Nagpur is the RSS headquarters, which has propelled the Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate. Now given the fact that a Modi wave is supposed to be pushing the BJP to power, it is surprising that he has not campaigned here at all. He has done the fringe meetings, but skipped the saffron headquarters. The reason is not far to seek. In caste-communal calculus of the Nagpur Lok Sabah seat, Gadkari needs the support of a sizeable Muslim votes to break Muttemwar’s grip over the constituency.” We cannot risk losing even a fraction of the votes that we can get from Mominpura,” explains a Gadkari aide.
But then it is not as if Modi does not figure in the campaign here. Indeed, Muttemwar, a good mimic, regales his audiences by referring to Modi as the Rajesh Khanna of the yesteryears and sends the crowd into peals of laughter when he says” Pushpa, I hate tears,” picking a line that Khanna whispered in Sharmila Tagore’s ears. Of course, he parodies this to show Modi’s concern for the poor.
The contest is seen as a close one, with the other players like the AAP and the BSP only playing spoilers. For Nagpurians, the fact that Muttemwar, a former union minister and party general secretary, has almost played his innings, and by contrast Gadkari is the former party president and RSS blue-eyed boy who is tipped to be a ministerial heavyweight as well, could make all the difference in the final count.
In Chhindwara, Kamalnath is battling an unusual element — the district administration. Known as a facilitator almost globally, he and his team have run into many hurdles and have been forced to fight with the Election Commission virtually at every step. ‘‘He was out and out a BJP man sans the party badge, finally we succeeded in getting him transferred today,” said one of his aides. The Collector Mahesh Chandra Choudhary was incidentally the 8th officer to be transferred in Madhya Pradesh on the same ground.
For the man who has transformed the face of this district that was known thirty four years ago only as the place that had a returned a Congress MP, Gargi Shankar Mishra, in the anti-Indira post emergency wave, Kamalnath still campaigns with the zeal of a newcomer. He flies the chopper, and walks the dusty village roads with the same energy. This is perhaps the only Congress constituency, where it is only Kamalnath, and no one else. By contrast, the BJP does not talk of a Modi ‘sarkar’, and both the chief minister, Shivraj Singh Chauhan and Modi, appear on bill boards. The Congress did not do well here in the recently concluded assembly elections, but then Kamalnath has been immune to such fluctuations in his party’s fortunes.
More or less, the same story repeats itself in Bhandara, Ramtek and Wardha with the man on the street more concerned about the man who would be available at hand, rather than some issue that has a remote resonance.
Anil Sharma
