Madhya Pradesh setback prompted 10% reservation move

New Delhi: Among the first to hail the Centre’s move for a 10% quota for economically backward upper castes was Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, where discontent of the cross-section of people was identified as one of the main reasons for BJP’s narrow defeat.
BJP now hopes that the tide can be turned in the Lok Sabha elections, especially in the Gwalior-Chambal, Bundelkhand and Malwa regions where it faced reverses with upper-caste anger being targeted at senior central ministers from the state, Narendra Singh Tomar and Thawar Chand Gehlot.

“This decision will bring justice to the upper castes who have been deprived of benefits for long,” Chouhan said. Extrapolation of the assembly results shows that BJP may corner only 17 out of 29 Lok Sabha seats in Madhya Pradesh in 2019, compared to 27 in 2014.

“MP is a laboratory of the RSS and the feedback on the loss has been taken very seriously by BJP. We lost almost 22 seats where the loss margin was lesser than NOTA votes. We fell just four seats short of Congress and seven seats short of the majority mark. Chouhan’s remark during the campaign in Gwalior region – that no one can finish reservation – had further ignited the upper-caste anger after the SC/ST Act ordinance was brought,” a senior BJP leader in the state told ET, refusing to be quoted.

NOTA votes accounted for almost 1.5% in Madhya Pradesh, where the ultimate victory margin was 0.1%.

BJP’s feedback was that the people wanted to punish specifically its cabinet ministers from the state. Union social justice minister Thawar Chand Gehlot’s son Jitendra lost from a seat in Ratlam by 5,500 votes which he had won by 8,000 votes last time. Almost 2,500 NOTA votes were polled on the seat this time. BJP also failed in the Gwalior-Chambal region which was the responsibility of Gwalior MP NS Tomar who decided most candidates here. BJP won just seven out of the 34 seats here, against 20 seats it had bagged in 2013, contributing in a big way to its loss in the state.

In Rajasthan, too, the share of NOTA had stood at 1.3% of the votes polled. Samanya Pichhda Alpsankhayak Kalyan Samaj (SAPAKS), led by former bureaucrat Hiralal Trivedi in Madhya Pradesh, and the Samata Andolan Samiti (SAS), of retired Rajasthan civil service officer Parashar Narayan Sharma, were at the forefront of the protests in the state during the campaign.