Bhopal: The Congress party has released a list of 40 star campaigners for eight out of the 29 Lok Sabha seats in Madhya Pradesh that go to the polls on May 12. Party president Rahul Gandhi, his mother Sonia Gandhi, sister Priyanka Gandhi and former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh top the list.
Apart from Rahul, senior party leaders who will campaign for the eight Lok Sabha candidates in one of the election rounds include, an accused in the multilayered Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board scam, ex-RSS leader, a gadget-savvy seer and others. (Vyapam is the acronym for the Hindi name -- Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal -- of the public exam body.)
Taking a large number of Congress workers by surprise, the party declared Gulab Singh Kirar, one of the key accused in the Vyapam scandal, as one of its star campaigners for the party for the third phase of the Lok Sabha elections in the state. (Voting will be held in the central Indian state in the last four rounds -- April 29, May 6, May 12 and May 19. -- of the seven-phased Indian general elections.)
Gulab, a relative and close aide of former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, was suspended from the BJP after his name figured in the sensational Vyapam scam that rocked MP politics a few years ago. Gulab is accused of helping his son fraudulently crack the pre-PG Medical Test in 2011, and an FIR against the Kirars is registered at the Jhansi Road police station in Gwalior district.
Later, after the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) took over the investigation, the agency registered three FIRs in the Vyapam scam in July 2015. The CBI has named 21 candidates in the FIR in connection with the PMT Test 2010, and eight in the second case related to the Pre-PG examination of 2011. Gulab's son Shakti Singh Kirar has been named in the latter case.
Gulab had joined Congress party in the presence of Congress president Rahul Gandhi – who was on a two-day tour in the Malwa-Nimar region – in Indore ahead of the Assembly elections in 2018.
State Congress leadership refused to respond to speak on the inclusion of Gulab in the party’s campaigners' list meant for its eight candidates whose electoral fate will be decided in the third round of polling in the state.
“Senior Congress leaders have given me a responsibility and only they can explain or clarify,” Gulab himself said.
BJP lashes out
The state BJP took the opportunity to launch a scathing attack on the Congress.
“Ahead of the last assembly polls, Congress leaders had blamed the BJP for the Vyapam scam and demanded action. But now that Gulab Singh Kirar has joined the Congress, they have no qualms naming him a star campaigner,” said BJP state spokesperson Rajneesh Agrawal.
Other notables on poll trail
The campaigners' list also includes gadget-savvy ‘seer’ Namdeo Das Tyagi who loves to address himself as Computer Baba. Tyagi has abandoned the status of Cabinet Minister accorded to him by the previous Chouhan government. Tyagi decided to quit the BJP after he was denied a party’s ticket to contest in the 2018 Assembly elections. Later, he joined Congress party and extensively campaigned against the BJP government on the Narmada belt, from where cases of illegal sand mining were widely reported.
Another star campaigner is Ramkrishna Kusmaria, an ex-RSS leader and a former minister in the Chouhan government. Kusmaria, a former MP and MLA, had joined Congress six months ago on being denied ticket for the 2018 assembly elections. The former chairman of Bundelkhand Development Authority belongs to the OBC community which has a sizeable presence in the region.
The other star campaigners include Hardik Patel, the young Patidar leader from Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath, Congress Lok Sabha candidate for Bhopal Digvijaya Singh, cricketer-turned politician Navjot Singh Sidhu, actress Nagma Morarji, Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, Rajasthan Deputy Chief Minister Sachin Pilot and others.
The eight Lok Sabha constituencies going to polls on May 12 are Morena, Bhind (SC), Gwalior, Guna, Sagar, Vidisha, Bhopal and Rajgarh.
