Raipur: The Congress strategy of fielding four MLAs, elected just six months ago, in the Lok Sabha polls in Chhattisgarh failed to pay off with only one of them emerging victorious. The other three tasted defeated at the hands of BJP candidates. Barring the ruling Congress, no other party in the state had fielded its sitting MLAs in the general election held in April. An upbeat Congress, after winning 68 of the 90 Assembly seats in the last years election, had fielded its incumbent legislators in four Lok Sabha seats – Bastar, Surguja, Raigarh, all three reserved for Scheduled Tribe candidates, and Mahasamund, hoping to repeats its recent success.
Of them, only Dipak Baij, a young leader and second- time MLA from Chitrakot, won from the Naxal-hit Bastar seat defeating BJP’s Baiduram Kashyap by 38,982 votes. In the process, Baij broke the winning streak of the BJP in Batsar, where the saffron party has never lost since 1998 in Lok Sabha polls. In the Surguja parliamentary constituency, Khel Sai Singh, the incumbent Congress MLA from Premnagar, lost to BJPs Renuka Singh by a huge margin of 1,57,873 votes. Similarly, Congress MLA from Dharamjaigarh, Laljeet Singh Rathiya, lost to BJPs Gomtee Sai in the Raigarh lok sabha seat by 66,027 votes.
Senior Congress leader Dhanendra Sahu is another sitting MLA who has lost. He was defeated in Mahasamund by BJPs Chunnilal Sahu by 90,511 votes. The BJP, which badly lost assembly elections in November last year, staged a stunning comeback in the Lok Sabha polls, winning nine of the 11 seats at stake in Chhattisgarh. The Congress managed to grab the remaining two seats, one more than it had won in 2014.
