This parliamentary constituency is the cynosure of all eyes in Madhya Pradesh as Congress State president Arun Yadav, is trying his fortune against the BJP’s State general secretary Nandkumar Singh Chouhan and Aam Aadmi Party’s State convenor Alok Agrawal.
The constituency’s history is rather interesting. The inclination of Khandwa’s electorate dovetails with the country’s poll inclination as national electoral issues always influence the denizens and the constituency has been accorded weightage by bigwigs of the BJP and the Congress.
The saffron party’s founding father Kushabhau Thakre contested his first and last general election from Khandwa. Either the Congress or the BJP emerged victorious in most of the polls, including a by-election, conducted here. On one occasion, a Bharatiya lok Dal (BlD) nominee won and on another the laurels were worn by a Bharatiya Jan Sangh candidate.
Most of the polls involved dilemma and were stiffly contested. It is difficult to fathom the minds of Khandwa’s aware voters who caused surprising outcomes. Thakre’s victory margin was 38,486 in the 1979 by-election but the saffron party lost by almost as many votes in the 1980 hustings.
Chouhan represented Khandwa four times sans break from 1996 to 2009 but the myth of his invincibility was shattered by Yadav last time. The Congress dominated in the polls from 1957 to 1971 but was successfully challenged in 1977 by the BlD’s Parmanand Govindjiwala who rode on the post-Emergency anti-Indira wave.
In 1980, Thakre drowned in the country’s pro-Congress wave and Thakur Shivkumar Singh emerged victorious. The sympathy wave following then Premier Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 worked in favour of the Congress’ local leader Kalicharan Sakargaye.
However in 1989, the ‘recoil’ of the Bofors scam hit the Congress and resulted in the victory of a minnow Burhanpur’s cotton businessman Amritlal Tarwala who was the BJP nominee. In 1991, the waning popularity of the Vishwanath Pratap Singh regime and another sympathy wave created by Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination catapulted the Congress’ Thakur Mahendra Kumar Singh to the lok Sabha.
Five years later, the Ram Janmabhoomi issue altered sentiments and the saffron banner was unfurled.
Yadav, who served as Minister of State, assumed the Madhya Pradesh Congress Committee’s reins at a juncture when the party’s morale was at the nadir due to a rout in last year’s Assembly elections.
His challenges are compounded by the ‘Modi wave’ and Indian Institute of Technology alumnus Agrawal — active in the Narmada Bachao Andolan for more than a couple of decades — who wields considerable influence among oustees of submergence-affected villages.