Krishna Gaur is Bhopal Mayor, Moghe Bags Indore, Kamla Bua is Biggest Winner!
Bhopal — The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Madhya Pradesh has swept seven of the 12 mayoral positions for which polling was held during the first leg of the two phase civic elections on December 11, the main Opposition Congress and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) ended their tally with two seats each, while independent transgender candidate Kamla Bua mapped a hands down victory in Sagar.
In the state capital, Krishna Gaur of the BJP beat her nearest rival Abha Singh of the Congress by a margin of over 15,000 votes to earn the mayor’s chair back for the BJP after a decade-long gap.
Gaur is the daughter-in-law of top BJP leader and Urban Administration Minister Babulal Gaur.
In the commercial capital of Indore, former Khargone MP Krishna Murari Moghe of the BJP overcame a stiff challenge from Pankaj Sanghvi of the Congress to wrest the mayoral chair with a margin of over 3,000 votes.
In the culture capital of Jabalpur, Prabhat Jha of the BJP trounced his nearest rival Dinesh Yadav of the Congress by a margin of over 20,000 votes.
Earlier, Samiksha Gupta of the BJP provided the ruling party with its most comprehensive victory of the season, she beat her nearest rival Uma Sengar of the Congress by a margin of over 37,000 votes for the Gwalior mayoral chair.
In Khandwa, BJP candidate Bhawna Shah – wife of Tribal Welfare Minister Kunwar Vijay Shah – won the mayoral position beating her nearest rival Sunita Sakargay of the Congress by a margin of over 8,000 votes.
In Burhanpur, Madhuri Patel of the BJP beat her nearest rival Shahnaz Ansari of the Congress by over 4,000 votes, Patel is the wife of outgoing mayor Atul Patel.
In Rewa, Shivendra Patel of the BJP beat his nearest rival Prahlad Singh of the Congress by a little over 6,000 votes.
In Katni, Nirmala Pathak of the Congress beat her nearest rival Alka Jain of the BJP by a margin of over 4,000 votes.
In Dewas, Rekha Verma of the Congress beat her nearest rival Babli Yadav of the BJP by a margin of over 11,000 votes.
The two wins for the Congress mark a 100 per cent improvement over its tally in 2004, when it had managed to win only a single contest with outgoing Bhopal mayor Sunil Sood pulling off a largely unexpected but spectacular victory over Bhagwandas Sabnani of the BJP.
Continuing to stab both the Congress and the BJP in the north-east of the state, BSP candidates Pushkar Singh Tomar and Renu Shah won the Satna and Singrauli mayoral positions.
Tomar, a former BJP man who quit the party after being denied a poll ticket, beat his closest rival Manish Tiwari of the Congress by a margin of over 3,000 votes while Renu Shah beat Kantidev Singh of the BJP by nearly 2300 votes.
In Sagar, independent transgender candidate Kamla Bua emerged as the biggest winner of the current electoral season beating Suman Ahirwar of the BJP by a whopping 43,433 vote margin.
Though impressive by any standards, the BJP tally of seven, out of the 12 declared results, marks only a marginal downturn in the party fortunes – since 2004 when it claimed nine mayoral chairs in the state – and puts to rest any ambitious speculations of an anti-incumbency vote against the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government, at least at this juncture.
