Can Kamal Nath stage a comeback?
A day after he resigned as the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, Kamal Nath flew into Delhi and was ensconced in his residence at 1, Tughlaq Road, from where over the years he has fought and won many an electoral battle for the Congress as well as played a role in the downfall of a couple of opposition-led central governments. This March, in a bitter twist of irony, he found himself at the receiving end, blindsided by a colleague 24 years his junior. It cost him the hard-earned chief ministership of a state that the Congress won just 15 months ago.
In his study, pictures of key members of the Nehru-Gandhi family whom he has worked with adorn the wall behind his desk. The one that finds centre stage is of Sanjay Gandhi, his Doon School buddy and political mentor. It was as one of Sanjay's storm-troopers that a young Kamal Nath cut his political teeth. After playing a role in staying the arrest of Indira Gandhi by a special court in 1979, he was rewarded with a ticket the next year to contest the Chhindwara Lok Sabha seat, which covers the largest district in Madhya Pradesh. Nath went on to win the seat nine times before making way for his son Nakul in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. Significantly, of the 29 seats that the Congress contested in the state in the general election, it won only one, Chhindwara. The other 28 went to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Among the most prominent Congress losers in the state was Jyotiraditya Scindia, scion of the Gwalior royalty, who lost family pocket borough Guna for the first time since 2002. That defeat would set in motion a chain reaction that would result in Jyotiraditya joining the BJP along with 22 Congress MLAs two weeks ago. It changed the political landscape and dealt a body blow to the Kamal Nath government, which had cobbled together an administration after the Congress registered a surprise win in the 2018 assembly election. It was a victory that ended 15 years of uninterrupted BJP rule in the state, but it was a tenuous one. The Congress won 114 seats in the 230-strong assembly and needed four Independents and MLAs from two other parties to cross the simple majority mark
