Madhya Pradesh CM gears up for bypoll & choose to have a cup of tea with Dalit,OBC,Muslim,MP bypoll, Madhya Pradesh bye election 2016 dates, Maihar, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, mini smart city, CM’s Maihar visit
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- Last Updated: Monday, 04 January 2016 15:55
Madhya Pradesh CM gears up for bypoll & choose to have a cup of tea with Dalit,OBC,Muslim,MP bypoll, Madhya Pradesh bye election 2016 dates, Maihar, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, mini smart city, CM’s Maihar visit
When a chief minister chooses to have a cup of tea each with a Dalit, an OBC and a Muslim in their homes in different localities, more than 400 km from the state capital, it’s not difficult to foretell that an election is round the bend.
The temple town of Maihar is part of the eponymous assembly constituency that will soon elect a new MLA. The bypoll, whose schedule is yet to be announced by the Election Commission, has been necessitated because the Congress MLA has resigned after shifting loyalties to the ruling BJP.
For Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Maihar is more than just any other byelection because it follows the humiliating defeat his party, the BJP, suffered in Ratlam-Jhabua Lok Sabha constituency last month and the reversals in urban body elections last week.
Chouhan flew to Satna, the district headquarters, last week and spent the night in Maihar. He visited several municipal wards in Maihar and heard out residents recounting their problems.
The CM of 10 years had tea with the Dalit, the OBC and the Muslim in a carefully scripted series of visits to their houses. In the less than 24 hours he spent in the constituency, he visited places of worship of different communities and promised to convert Maihar into a mini smart city at a cost of Rs 25 crore, and the district headquarters into a smart city. The money for the mini smart city will be spent on door-to-door-garbage collection, installation of CCTV cameras and beautifying a lake besides other initiatives.
Referring to the CM’s Maihar visit, the Congress’s main spokesman K K Mishra said, “He did something similar in Ratlam but the outcome proved that his theatrics did not bear any fruit. We will also respond with our own social engineering and win the bypoll.”
Much before the election was announced in Ratlam, the CM had visited the constituency several times and doled out sops and announced a slew of schemes, none of which helped the BJP stop Kantilal Bhuria from winning the parliamentary seat.