Madhya Pradesh remains a BJP bastion, party wins 27 seats

Bhopal: It is once again a massive Bharatiya Janata Party sweep in Madhya Pradesh. The party has won 27 seats out of the total 29 Lok Sabha seats the state has.

The Congress has won seats where its stalwarts Jyotiraditya Scindia and Kamal Nath were in the fray. Congress has lost Gwalior and Satna with a slender margin. Congress senior leader Ajay Singh lost to his BJP counterpart by less than 10000 votes in Satna.

The key constituencies to be watched were Vidisha, Guna and Chhindwara. In Chhindwara, Digvijaya's brother Lakshman Singh contested against Swaraj. However, she has managed to retain her seat by a huge margin. She had easy win in 2009, too, after nomination papers of the Congress candidate Rajkumar Patel were rejected by the Election Commission.

Laksman Singh returned to the Congress in January, 2013. He joined the BJP in 2004 but was expelled from the party in 2010 after he openly criticised its then president Nitin Gadkari. He was elected as Rajgarh MP four times as a Congress member and once on the BJP ticket. In 2009, he lost to Congress candidate in Rajgarh.

In Guna, Scindia was up against BJP's Jaibhansingh Pawaiya. He has won the seats by a margin of over 1.2 lakj votes. In 1998, Pawaiya had challenged late Madhavrao Scindia in Gwalior and reduced his victory margin to just 26,000 votes.

BJP's Chaudhary Chandrabhan Singh, who was confident of giving a tough fight to Union Minister Kamal Nath on his traditional Chhindwara Lok Sabha seat, drawing courage from BJP's performance in 2013 assembly elections in which it bagged four out of seven seats from there, has lost to him by over 1 lak votes. The 67-year-old has defeated BJP rival Singh twice in the past.

Out of the total 29 seats, 13 seats were held by the BJP, while Congress was in the 11 Lok Sabha seats in Madhya Pradesh.

Madhya Pradesh is a stronghold of the BJP. The Congress has been routed from the state after a decade rule of Digvijaya Singh, which residents in the state feel were the era of darkness. The credits for the BJP's win in Madhya Pradesh couldn't be only given to the Modi wave because Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan enjoys a large support in the state. The voters had shown their trust in the leadership of Chouhan in the last Assembly elections.