New Delhi: Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel won the Patan seat against nephew and BJP candidate Vijay Baghel by a margin of 19,723 votes. Vijay Baghel is an MP from the Durg parliamentary constituency, under which Patan falls.
Amit Jogi, son of former chief minister Ajit Jogi and chief of the Janata Congress Chhattisgarh-Jogi (JCC-J) also contested the election from the seat and is currently trailing at third position. His party the JCC (J) was founded in 2016 after the former CM broke away from the Congress.
The Baghel versus Baghel fight is one of the most watched contests in the 2023 Chhattisgarh assembly election. But this isn’t the first time that uncle Bhupesh and nephew Vijay have been pitted against each other — the two went head-to-head in 2003, 2008, and 2013 as well.
Bhupesh has won two of the three contests, but Vijay beat him in 2008 by a margin of 7,842 votes.
In 2019, six months into Bhupesh’s first tenure as CM, Vijay won the Durg parliamentary seat by over 3 lakh votes. In Patan alone, Vijay had secured over 30,000 votes.
Five-time MLA Bhupesh Baghel contested, and won, his first assembly election from Patan in 1993 — when Chhattisgarh was still a part of Madhya Pradesh.
The Baghels are Kurmis — a dominant OBC caste group in the state that, along with Sahus, reportedly forms 36 percent of the state’s population.
The Chhattisgarh Congress entered the fray on the back of the Baghel government’s marquee schemes, such as the Godhan Nyay Yojana, which promises procurement of cow dung at Rs 2/kg from cattle-rearers, and the Rajiv Gandhi Gramin Bhumihin Krishak Majdoor Nyay Yojna, which provides yearly financial assistance to the families of landless agricultural labourers in the state’s rural areas.
In the runup to the elections, the Congress promised farm loan waivers and paddy procurement at Rs 3,200/quintal.
Meanwhile, the BJP’s election strategy involved targeting the Baghel government on the issues of corruption, implementation of welfare schemes, and not fulfilling promises from its 2018 manifesto — including liquor prohibition.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)