Digvijaya should contest from a tough seat, says Kamal Nath

BHOPAL: In the state Congress’ list of probable candidates, former chief minister Digvijaya Singh has emerged as the hottest name. Party workers from across the state want him to contest the Lok Sabha elections from practically every other seat.
On Saturday, chief minister Kamal Nath dropped a bomb on his party colleague saying, “Digvijaya Singh will choose which seat he wants to contest from.I have requested him that he should contest from the toughest seat. There are three or four such seats which the party has not won in the past 30 to 35 years.” Kamal Nath was speaking to reporters in Chhindwara.
The chief minister, however, did not specify which are the toughest seats for the Congress party.
But electoral history makes Bhopal, Vidisha and Indore the toughest and invincible saffron bastions. Party workers have demanded that the senior Congress leader who is presently Rajya Sabha MP should contest either from Bhopal or Indore, seats the party last won in 1984. Supporters of Digvijaya Singh, however, said that the senior leader would have preferred to contest from Rajgarh – a seat he represented in Parliament in the early Nineties.
But Congress is in no disposition to give cake-walk constituencies to its senior leaders. “We want to win the maximum number of constituencies from the state. For that, we need senior leaders to contest the tough seats which the Congress party has been losing for a long time,” said state Congress media committee chairperson Shobha Oza. “Morale of party workers get boosted when senior leaders lead from the front. Why should Digvijaya Singh with all his experience and the kind of work he has done in the state all his life be fielded from an easy seat? Congress wants to give the BJP a run for every constituency this Lok Sabha,” she argued.
It was widely argued that if Congress is serious about wresting Bhopal BJP bastion, then the only person capable of it is Digvijaya Singh. The mathematics is simple – there are two cabinet ministers of the Kamal Nath government from here who are known to be in the former chief minister’s faction. Arif Aqueel from Bhopal North assembly seat and PC Sharma from the Bhopal South West assembly constituency.
A third assembly seat, Bhopal Central, has gone to the Congress for the first time. State Congress leaders argued that Digvijaya Singh having been chief minister of the state for ten years is the Congress’ best known face in the state capital. He also has friends in the BJP like veteran leader Babulal Gaur who hold massive influence in Bhopal.
If Congress seriously wants to contest Indore against Lok Sabha speaker and eight times MP Sumitra Mahajan, then it needs to field Digvijaya Singh, state Congress leaders said. “Digvijaya Singh may hail from Raghogarh in Guna but his schooling, higher education has been in Indore. He is a student from Daly College and got his engineering degree from Shri Govindram Seksaria Institute of Technology and Science. He regularly visits Indore and even the party office there. He knows every party worker in Indore. If anyone can win Indore for Congress, it is him,” a senior state Congress leader said.