Former Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel has a lot at stake in the Rajnandgaon Lok Sabha which goes to polls in the second phase on April 26.
Baghel, the sitting MLA from Patan is pitted against BJP's Santosh Pandey who is RSS protégé.
In the recently held Assembly election, Congress won five out of the eight seats coming under Rajnandgaon.
The BJP has fielding sitting MP Pandey, who hails from Kawardha district and was state general secretary between 2014 and 2019 before being elected as Member of Parliament from Rajnandgaon in 2019. His early political career started as an RSS Karyakarta.
At the BJP organisation level, he was Mandal Adhyaksha and also two term Yuva Morcha president from Rajnandgaon. He takes the credit of setting up medical college and central school in Kawardha district and other places and also Vande Bharat train stoppage at Dongargarh as being elected as MP from Rajnandgaon seat.
Considered as preferred choice in the Delhi-durbar of congress party including Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi, Baghel was the chief minister of Chhattisgarh from 2018 to 2023.
Congress in the state and under leadership of Baghel as chief minister was leveraged with confidence to repeat the performance of 2019 Assembly election. However, this did not happen, and it was was left to occupy Opposition bench with 35 seats out of 90 member house.
Amid humiliating assembly defeat suffered in 2003, the congress is battle ready to take head-on against the mighty BJP and Modi wave. Apart from internal party feud, Baghel is faced with ED and EOW heat on Mahadev Satta App and a recently charged/FIR lodged under PMLA act.
Though Baghel and Congress refuted these charges as baseless and witch hunt, the fact remains that Baghel is under agency radar for wrong reasons.
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