Bhopal, Oct 22 The Samajwadi Party (SP) has fielded Arjun Arya as a candidate for the bypolls in Budhni in Madhya Pradesh on Tuesday.
The development is viewed as a split in the INDIA bloc in Madhya Pradesh because Arjun Arya resigned from Congress two days ago, and the Samajwadi Party made him a candidate from the high-profile constituency.
Arya's name was announced after several rounds of discussions between Congress state president Jitu Patwari and SP leadership failed to reach to any conclusion.
Akhilesh Yadav-led SP had demanded that both the alliance partners will contest the bypolls together in Budhni and Vijaypur seats. However, the Congress announced its candidates for both seats.
Samajwadi Party spokesperson Yash Bhartiya said Congress does not learn a lesson from its defeat and the grand old party also misled Arjun Arya who was seeking a Congress ticket.
However, the SP was yet to announce its candidate for the Vijaypur Assembly bypolls.
The Congress has fielded former minister Rajkumar Patel from Budhni, who had won this seat twice in 1993 and 1998. He is considered a close aide of former CM Digvijaya Singh.
Budhni is the bastion of BJP veteran Shivraj Singh Chouhan, who represented this seat for six times between 1990 and 2023. The bypolls was necessitated after Chouhan was elected as Lok Sabha MP from Vidisha and resigned from the state assembly.
In the 2023 assembly elections, Chouhan won from Budhni by a margin of more than 1.05 lakh votes against Congress' Vikram 'Mastal' Sharma, a TV actor.
Chouhan was elected MLA for the first time from Budhni in 1990, however, he had resigned from the state assembly after winning Lok Sabha by-election from Vidisha in 1991.
His second inning from his home turf began after he replaced Babulal Gaur as Chief Minister in 2005. Chouhan contested bypolls from Budhni in 2006 and since then he won as many as four consecutive assembly elections until 2023.
From the Vijaypur seat, the Congress has fielded Mukesh Malhotra against BJP's Ramniwas Rawat, who had represented this particular seat for six terms between 1990 and 2023 as Congress MLA.
Rawat resigned from the Congress and state assembly during the Lok Sabha elections and joined the BJP. His shifting into the ruling side necessitated bypolls in Vijaypur.
He is the Forest Minister in Chief Minister Mohan Yadav's cabinet.
The two seats are scheduled to go to vote on November 13 while the counting will be on November 23.
--IANS
pd/dan
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