Public campaigning for the assembly by-polls at Budhni and Vijaypur constituencies of Madhya Pradesh concluded on Monday evening.

The voting at both the seats is scheduled on 13 November.

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The by-election at Budhni in Sehore district has been necessitated, as the sitting BJP MLA Shivraj Singh Chouhan resigned from the State Assembly after winning the Lok Sabha polls this year and becoming the union agriculture minister.

At Vijaypur in Sheopur district, sitting Congress MLA Ramniwas Rawat resigned from the Congress and joined the BJP during the Lok Sabha polls, forcing the by-election.

Now the BJP has given Ramniwas Rawat the ticket from Vijaypur and the main contest is between Rawat and the Congress candidate Mukesh Malhotra.

Malhotra is a tribal leader belonging to the Sahariya tribe. He was earlier with the BJP but quit and joined the Congress during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. There are more than 70000 Sahariya voters in the constituency.

Congressman-turned-BJP-minister Ramniwas Rawat is a six-time Congress MLA. He won on a Congress ticket in the assembly elections in 2023.

However, he resigned from the Congress on 30 April 2024 and joined the BJP, after which he was made the Forest Minister in the present BJP state government.

In Budhni, the main contestants are Congress candidate Rajkumar Patel and BJP candidate Ramakant Bhargava.

Rajkumar Patel was a minister during the Congress state government led by the then CM Digvijaya Singh. Patel has won the Budhni seat in the Sehore district twice in a row in 1993 and 1998.

He lost to the BJP’s Rajendra Singh in 2003. Rajendra Singh, however, resigned in 2005 to enable Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s entry into the state assembly.

Chouhan was named the MP CM on 29 November 2005, but he was a Lok Sabha member at the time, so he contested and won a by-election from Budhni to become an MLA, after Rajendra Singh resigned.

Chouhan won the Budhni assembly continuously from 2006 to 2023 and remained MP CM four times till 2023.

In 2024, the BJP fielded Chouhan in the Lok Sabha polls and he won that comfortably. Subsequently, he was made the Union Agriculture Minister and he resigned from his MLA membership from Budhni, necessitating the assembly by-poll.

The BJP has fielded Ramakant Bhargava against Rajkumar Patel at Budhni.

Ramakant Bhargava is a former BJP Lok Sabha Member from Vidisha seat in Madhya Pradesh. He had won in the 2019 general elections. However, the party denied him a ticket in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and made Shivraj Singh Chouhan the candidate from Vidisha.

There are about 5.3 lakh voters jointly in both constituencies, and the election commission has set up 690 polling booths across the two seats.

The voting would be held in both constituencies on 13 November and results would be declared on 23 November.