{"id":505484,"date":"2024-03-16T17:30:29","date_gmt":"2024-03-16T12:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/?p=505484"},"modified":"2024-04-16T18:25:51","modified_gmt":"2024-04-16T12:55:51","slug":"brahmin-congress-leaders-madhya-pradesh-bjp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/politics\/brahmin-congress-leaders-madhya-pradesh-bjp\/","title":{"rendered":"Congress Brahmin leaders desert the party for the BJP in Madhya Pradesh"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>By<\/strong> <strong>Neeraj Mishra<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There has been an extraordinary inflow of Congressmen into the BJP in the past few months and it is estimated the party has lost close to 10,000 district-level leaders and workers who are now eyeing the panchayat and municipal elections. The trickle that started with Jyotiraditya Scindia and his 20 MLAs three years ago became a flood with each leader coaxing his followers to join the party in power. But of late, the senior leadership of the state, comprising mostly Brahmins, has decided to shift their weight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Suresh Pachauri, who was close to being discarded by the party, decided to take a jump and with him went Sanjay Shukla from Indore, Arunoda Choubey and Alok Chansoriya from Jabalpur. They were welcomed into the fold by BJP\u2019s Brahmin face in Nadhya Pradesh, Narottam Mishra. It is significant in light of the Ram Mandir movement and related developments. The BJP has announced tongue-in-cheek that the Congress has now become a Catholic Syndicate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For a long time, Brahmins controlled the politics in the state matched only by thakurs. From Ravishankar Shukla, Shankar Dayal Sharma, Katju, Shyama Charan Shukla to Motilal Vora, Brahmins more or less occupied the top within the party. Only the Scindias in the North and thakurs of Vindhya-Bundelkhand\u00a0were able to match their strength largely through Arjun Singh and Digvjaya Singh. The top rung spawned several dozen lower rung Brahmin leaders who formed the backbone of the party in the entire state: the chansoriyas, Choubeys\u00a0 and PC Sharma etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>With the BJP pushing hard to come up with its own set of Brahmins in Rajendra Shukla and Narottam, the desertion from the Congress is being felt deeply by the party. Less influential Brahmin leaders like Sharma have aligned themselves with Digvijaya Singh for lack of a leader of the stature of Kamal Nath or Singh. The second or younger generation of Congress leaders now has an OBC dominance as in Jitu Patwari and Yadav etc. All the major cities in the state have become bereft of Brahmin leaders and the only name worth it in the Congress now is Vivek Tankha, a Kashmiri Pandit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Meanwhile, the Congress is still struggling to announce its Lok Sabha candidates with not many takers. Ironically, the prime reason appears to be Rahul Gandhi. Rahul is not seen as very sympathetic towards the Hindu religion, a result of BJP\u2019s relentless negative campaign against him. He has himself done very little to dispel such notions by consistently goofing in public eye about religion. The more politically disturbing element for the Congress is that Congressmen in the state do not see him as a winner despite both his Yatras going through the state. The one consistent complaint of course is that he never gives enough time to politics and state-level politicians preferring to stay in his closed circle and depending on their feedback.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Neeraj Mishra There has been an extraordinary inflow of Congressmen into the BJP in the past few months and it is estimated the party has lost close to 10,000 district-level leaders and workers who are now eyeing the panchayat and municipal elections. The trickle that started with Jyotiraditya Scindia and his 20 MLAs three [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":505513,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[162562,7,1497,4],"tags":[86,111,28950],"yst_prominent_words":[],"ppma_author":[140543],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/d2r2ijn7njrktv.cloudfront.net\/apnlive\/uploads\/2024\/03\/16170649\/ezgif-2-eecb11412e-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"authors":[{"term_id":140543,"user_id":4,"is_guest":0,"slug":"apnnewsdesk","display_name":"APN Live","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/478eacb893eda88aa6ed8d99b005bf58?s=96&r=g"}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505484"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505484\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505484"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=505484"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apnlive.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=505484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- html is corrupted -->