In Maps: How The Demography Of Madhya Pradesh Affects Its Politics

Madhya Pradesh, the heart of India, is a remarkably diverse state.

Travel from district to district, past the splendours of Sanchi, the jyotirlinga at Omkareshwar, through the tribal belt, bustling Bhopal, or the grand palaces of Gwalior, and you are struck by myriad variations — cultural, geographical, racial, historical, social, political, and, as all true foodies will concur, culinary.

Here we shall undertake a cartographic tour of the state to understand the heterogeneity at play, as Madhya Pradesh prepares to vote in a new legislature on 17 November.

A brief political backgrounder first: From 2003, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has won three assembly elections back-to-back in style. But in 2018, the Congress won by a whisker, although it failed to cross the halfway mark on its own. The vote difference between the two parties was an infinitesimal 0.1 per cent.

Gallingly for the BJP, it lost 16 seats by less than 2 per cent of the vote. And, to add insult to injury, it still ended up polling slightly more than the Congress.

The bulk of these Congress rebels were concentrated in the north of the state, in the Gwalior region, and represented constituencies where the BJP lost by a margin of over 10 per cent.

All said and done, the Congress succeeded in 2018 because it capitalised on the state’s underlying diversity, by playing its traditional, repulsive brand of identity politics.

As the map below shows, Muslims are largely concentrated in the west of the state, in a belt running across the Malwa plateau from Ratlam to Bhopal. And this is where the Congress won a number of seats.

Making life harder for the BJP is another factor — the ‘others’ vote.

Discounting the BSP, the map below shows that most of these dozens of seats are largely located in tribal areas, with another chunk in the north, where scheduled castes are in greater numbers.

Fortunately, the BJP knows what it is up against, and has been running a fierce, silent, grassroots campaign in many of these regions from the start of the year.

That, plus the Congress rebels, Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s undiminished appeal, a slew of welfare and development schemes, a good monsoon, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaign, is what the party is banking on.

Therefore, in conclusion, the chances are high that the BJP will once again receive the popular mandate, and make it past the halfway mark with an enhanced vote share.