While the Bharatiya Janata Party is slated for a two-thirds majority in Madhya Pradesh under the leadership of chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, one question that is dominating political mindscapes is who will be the next chief minister of Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, as the saffron party is set to snatch these two states from the Congress as well.
Chouhan first won from the Budhni constituency in 1990, and was elected as a Member of Parliament for the first time in Lok Sabha from the Vidisha constituency in 1991. He later won the Budhni constituency seat in 2006 once again, retaining his hold on the constituency till date.
Mahant Balaknath (Rajasthan)
Parliamentarian Mahant Balaknath, who was fielded in the Rajasthan assembly election, is considered a frontrunner as the chief ministerial candidate after the latest trends showed the party comfortably crossing the halfway mark.
Balaknath is leading from his Tijara constituency, with Congress trailing by a huge margin. Balaknath, who is a Lok Sabha MP from Alwar and is just 40 years old, told news agency ANI that this time BJP on its will bag 120 seats in Rajasthan.
The reason for the BJP’s comfortable victory, according to Balaknath, is that the people wanted to get rid of Congress. He targeted the Rajasthan Congress on corruption, atrocities against women, and rising crimes.
Like Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, Balaknath also comes from the Nath community, and he has tremendous support and following in Alwar.
He had taken sannyasa back in his childhood days at the age of 6. The decision that he would become a saint was taken by his family members. Balaknath contends he always wanted to serve the society.
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Vasundhara Raje (Rajasthan)
Another contender for the top post is former chief minister Vasundhara Raje of the BJP. The BJP leader was also a Union minister in Atal Bihar Vajpayee’s cabinet. She was the first minister of small scale industries in the country. As of now, she is the party’s national vice president. She entered politics in 1984. She was a member of the BJP’s national executive. She was later elected as an MLA from Rajasthan’s Dholpur. She also became the vice president of the Yuva Morcha the same year.
Raje won the Rajasthan assembly election from Jhalrapatan in 2003, 2008, 2013 and 2018. She has also been a Lok Sabha member between 1989-91, 1991-96, 1996-98, 1998-99 and 1999-03. In 2018, Raje defeated the Congress party’s Manvendra Singh by 25000 votes. The Congress has fielded Ram Lal Chauhan from the seat.
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Raman Singh (Chhattisgarh)
Former Chhattisgarh chief minister Raman Singh of the BJP is the front-runner to become the CM again. Raman Singh’s political career started when he joined the party’s youth wing in 1976-77. He became a councillor of Kawardha municipality in 1983.
Raman Singh became an MLA from the Kawardha seat in 1990, in undivided Madhya Pradesh. In 1999, he became an MP from the Rajnandgaon constituency. He was also the Union Minister of State for Commerce and Industry between 1999 and 2003.
He became the CM of Chhattisgarh in 2003. He has been the MLA from the Rajnandgaon seat since 2008. He remained the CM of the state for three terms. In the 2018 polls, he defeated Congress party’s Karuna Shukla by around 17,000 votes from the Rajnandgaon seat. Raman Singh is up against Congress’s Girish Dewangan.
A Revanth Reddy (Telangana)
Fifty-four-year-old Revanth Reddy has proven once again to the Congress that the party is safe when entrusted to a Reddy. Barely two years after being Telangana Pradesh Congress President, the former Telugu Desam Party MLA who cut his teeth in the right-wing student union ABVP has scored a stellar victory by winning Telangana decisively.
Revanth Reddy took over as the Congress’s state president from long-time old-timer Uttam Kumar Reddy in 2021. By then he had been in the Congress for over four years with the party not being able to displace K Chandrashekar Rao’s then Telangana Rashtra Samithi. In 2021, the BJP had also begun making inroads into Telangana by winning bye-elections and getting four MLAs to the state. Their then party chief Bandi Sanjay took the saffron deep into the Telangana hinterland and the BJP was soon becoming a force to reckon with in the state.
By 2022, Reddy had begun touring constituencies and his campaigning had begun to see results. The BJP’s faux pas of dethroning Bandi Sanjay and replacing him with a meek Kishan Reddy propelled the Congress into the pole position even before the election season kicked in.
Once the elections were announced, Revanth Reddy could wean away more than 35 leaders from the BRS at various levels to join the Congress, thus strengthening the party.
