Sitting BJP MlA Bhima Mandavi from the insurgency-ridden Dantewada Assembly seat may witness a tougher contest this time with the Opposition Congress desperately looking at cornering a majority of the Bastar region seats during the upcoming Assembly polls.
Being a tribal leader from the Scheduled Tribe dominated district, Mandavi has a herculean task ahead to keep the voters’ attention focussed on developmental issues rather than pure politics. Political analysts and locals say that Mandavi has not fulfilled his poll promises and his chances of registering victory in 2013 Assembly polls is almost nill.
The Dantewada seat is mostly known as Congress citadel except in 2008 polls in which voters polled for the BJP to teach a lesson to Congress veteran Mahendra Karma, a known tribal face of the Congress in the State who was killed among 30 others in a deadly Maoist attack on May 25 this year. Congress has given enough hints that party would field Karma's son to cash in sympathy votes.
listing out his achievements to The Pioneer when he was telephoned, Mandavi stated that the seeds of Asia’s biggest education hub — The ‘Education City’ in Dantawada has been sown during his tenure as a legislator.
“I got a bridge constructed over Sankani-Dankani river, opened polytechnics while also took up the ‘lal Pani’ (Red Water) issue with the National Mineral Development Corporation (NDMC) and got the compensation distributed to people in the affected areas,” he said.
Mandavi also wants the NMDC move its headquarters to Bastar. “It’s my fondest wish,” he said. I also got funds mobilised from NDMC and Essar Group for development of educational facilities in Dantewada, he added.
On the Congress party’s agenda of taking the Jeeram ghati massacre episode to the people of the region as a poll plank, Mandavi remarked : ‘In that massacre we also lost our people’.