Bhopal, Nov 12 After a month-long high-voltage campaign for bypolls in Budhni and Vijaypur Assembly seats in Madhya Pradesh, voting will take place on Wednesday.
More than 5.3 lakh voters (2.74 lakh in Budhni and 2.54 lakh in Vijaypur) will vote to elect their new Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs).
Polling parties have reached booth centres by late evening on Tuesday as the voting will start at 7 am on Wednesday.
The upcoming by-elections to two Assembly seats in Madhya Pradesh have generated much interest in the state for different reasons.
Budhni, a high-profile chief ministerial seat represented by Union Minister for Agriculture Shivraj Singh Chouhan for the last 18 years, will be in focus.
With Chouhan moving to national politics, the contest here is between BJP's Ramakant Bhargava and former minister and Congress candidate Rajkumar Patel.
In the November 2023 Assembly elections, Chouhan won his fifth consecutive Assembly election with a margin of 1,04,974 votes.
During the Lok Sabha elections, when Chouhan was contesting from the Vidisha Lok Sabha constituency, then Budhni which is one of the seven Assembly segments in the Parliamentary seat, gave Chouhan a lead of 1.25 lakh votes.
The bypolls in Budhni is also been seen as a test of Chouhan’s political legacy because the BJP has picked his loyalist Bhargava as his replacement.
Leading the BJP's campaign in his bastion on Monday, Chouhan has stated that Bhargava's victory will be a return gift for him.
The second seat which is going to Assembly by-elections in Madhya Pradesh is Vijaypur where state forest minister Ram Niwas Rawat is seeking re-election from the seat as a BJP candidate.
The contest in Vijaypur will also be interesting because the result will decide whether the Congress will manage to retain its seat or the ruling BJP will wrest it from the opposition.
In the last 15 Assembly elections, Congress won Vijaypur nine times and BJP managed to win six times. Former MLA Ramniwas Rawat, who is now BJP's candidate this time, has won six elections from this seat between 1990 and 2023.
He however switched over to the BJP before the last LS elections and resigned from the state Assembly necessitating the by-elections to Vijaypur.
Congress has fielded Mukesh Malhotra, a tribal leader, against high-profile leader and minister Ramniwas Rawat.
--IANS
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