Congress candidate from the Budhni Assembly seat, Rajkumar Patel, and ruling BJP candidate from the Vijaypur Assembly constituency, Ramniwas Rawat, filed their respective nomination papers on Thursday for the Madhya Pradesh State Assembly by-polls scheduled for 13 November.

MP Chief Minister Dr Mohan Yadav, State BJP Chief V D Sharma, and other senior BJP leaders reached Vijaypur the Morena district to accompany Ramniwas Rawat during his nomination filing process.

Dr Yadav asserted that the BJP wave is continuing in Madhya Pradesh, and Ramniwas Rawat would emerge victorious. The CM said that the entire country and the state are on the path of development and progress under the BJP rule, and this trend would continue unabated.

Similarly, MP Congress Chief Jitu Patwari, Leader of Opposition in the State Assembly Umang Singhar, and several Congress leaders accompanied Rajkumar Patel as he filed his papers. The Congress also held a roadshow in the evening to garner support for its candidate.

Rajkumar Patel was a minister in the state Congress government under then CM Digvijaya Singh. He won the Budhni seat in Sehore district twice in a row, in 1993 and 1998.

He lost to the BJP’s Rajendra Singh in 2003. However, Rajendra Singh, resigned in 2005 to facilitate Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s entry into the State Assembly.

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

Chouhan continuously won the Budhni Assembly seat from 2006 to 2023 and has remained MP CM four times until 2023.

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

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

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

In Vijaypur, the main contest is between Congressman-turned-BJP-minister Ramniwas Rawat and Congress candidate Mukesh Malhotra.

Malhotra is a tribal leader from the Sahariya tribe. He was earlier with the BJP but quit to join the Congress during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. There are more than 70,000 Sahariya voters in the constituency.

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.

The results of the by-polls will be declared on 23 November.