Year of saffron supremacy, elephant deaths in Madhya Pradesh

Bhopal: The BJP's quest for total domination of Madhya Pradesh politics was realized in 2024, when it won all the 29 Lok Sabha seats in the state, including the last Congress bastion, Chhindwara.

This left the main opposition party with the onerous task of rebuilding itself in its one-time stronghold.

The stunning victory of the saffron outfit, which made a clean sweep in the Lok Sabha polls for the first time since the state's division in 2000, came just 6 months after it posted a comprehensive win in the assembly elections.

However, the BJP's sweep lost some sheen towards the year-end due to its defeat in the Vijaypur assembly bypoll and narrow victories in other by-elections, including in Amarwara and Budhni.

The Congress suffered its worst-ever Lok Sabha poll defeat in Madhya Pradesh, drawing a blank. The BJP wrested Chhindwara, the home turf of Congress veteran Kamal Nath, while party stalwart and former CM Digvijaya Singh lost from his home turf, Rajgarh.

Madhya Pradesh took a lead in the country in 2024 by launching two river-linking projects, the dream ventures of former Prime Minister late Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

The Harda firecracker factory blast, which claimed 11 lives and injured 200 others in February, and the death of 10 wild elephants in the Bandhavgarh National Park also kept the state in headlines.

The African cheetahs in the Kuno National Park (KNP) in Sheopur district continued to remain in the news more than two years after their translocation.

Cheetahs Vayu and Agni were released in the wild in KNP in early December. However, bad news came from the national park in late November when two cubs born to African cheetah Neerva were found dead.

The biggest political story from the state during the year was the BJP's stunning performance in the Lok Sabha polls.

In 2019, the BJP won 28 out of 29 Lok Sabha seats, with the Congress managing to protect Chhindwara, which eventually fell into saffron hands five years later. In 2014, the Congress managed to win only Guna and Chhindwara.

In the undivided Madhya Pradesh, the Congress had won all 40 Lok Sabha seats in the 1984 elections held after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

The BJP victory in all 29 Lok Sabha seats included some with record margins like Vidisha (Shivraj Singh Chouhan), Indore (Shankar Lalwani), and Guna (Jyotiraditya Scindia).

Chouhan's induction into the Union cabinet for the first time after serving as CM for four terms marked his arrival in national politics. Born into a farmer's family in Sehore district, the BJP stalwart is now the Union agriculture and rural development minister.

Assembly bypolls held five months after the Lok Sabha elections were a mixed bag for the BJP. Its candidate, Kamlesh Shah, who joined the ruling party after quitting as Congress MLA from Amarwara (ST) ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, narrowly won the by-election from the seat in November.

Shah, a loyalist of Kamal Nath, won by 3,252 votes, down from a comprehensive 25,086-ballot gap in 2023 when he was the Congress candidate from Amarwara.

Another senior Congress leader, Ramniwas Rawat, who deserted the party during the Lok Sabha polls to join the BJP and was later inducted into Chief Minister Mohan Yadav's cabinet, lost the bypoll from Vijaypur by a margin of 7,364 votes.

The BJP victory in the Budhni assembly bypoll was less than impressive. BJP candidate Ramakant Bhargava won by a margin of over 13,000 votes, which was nowhere close to Chouhan's victory gap of more than one lakh ballots from the seat in 2023.

After the debacle in the assembly polls in 2023, the Congress handed over the state party's leadership to former minister Jitu Patwari, who replaced Kamal Nath.

The ambitious Ken-Betwa National River Linking project, which will take off by the end of December, will benefit Chhatarpur, Panna, Tikamgarh, Niwadi, Damoh, Shivpuri, Datia, Raisen, Vidisha, and Sagar districts.

Once completed, it will provide irrigation facilities to farmers in 10.62 lakh hectares in the Bundelkhand region, spread across MP (8.11 lakh hectares) and Uttar Pradesh (2.51 lakh hectares). The project will also be a source of drinking water for a 41 lakh population in MP and 21 lakh people in UP, according to the state government.

On the lines of this national venture, the MP government has decided to implement the Parvati-Kalisindh-Chambal river linking project, which will benefit Guna, Shivpuri, Sehore, Dewas, Rajgarh, Ujjain, Agar-Malwa, Indore, Shajapur, Mandsaur, and Morena districts.

This project will provide irrigation facilities in 6.13 lakh hectares in MP. Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid its foundation stone on December 17 from Jaipur.

A massive blast in a firecracker factory in Harda district on February 6 killed 11 persons and injured over 200, raising questions over safety and licensing procedures in the state.

The death of two cheetah cubs disappointed wildlife lovers.

Since the reintroduction of the world's fastest land animal in the KNP in September 2022, the big cats have survived and adjusted to the new environment, a forester said.

All adult cheetahs and their 12 cubs at the KNP were healthy, the official said, adding the count of cheetahs at the KNP was last reported to be 24.

The Bandhavgarh National Park in Umaria district saw the death of 10 elephants in a span of just three days in late October. Preliminary investigation pointed to possible poisoning.