BJP's Rodmal Nagar Defeats Congress' Political Stalwart Digvijaya Singh In Rajgarh

In a major setback to Congress, party veteran and former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Digvijaya Singh lost the Lok Sabha elections from his traditional Rajgarh seat to the BJP candidate Rodmal Nagar by a margin of 1,46,089 votes. Sitting MP Rodmal Nagar secured 7,58,743 votes while Singh managed to bag 6,12,654 votes as per the EC data.

Returning to electoral politics after a hiatus of 33 years,  Singh, popularly known as Diggi Raja, failed to capture the Lok Sabha seat, known to be his domain.

A resident of Khujner in Madhya Pradesh, Rodmal Nagar joined politics by being part of the RSS since an early age. Nagar was first fielded in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, and in his debut defeated the then Congress sitting MP Narayan Singh Amlabe with a substantial majority. In 2019, Nagar retained the seat with a bigger majority, accumulating more than eight lakh votes, which was more than double the Congress candidate Mona Sustani’s vote share.

In the general elections of 1984, Digvijaya Singh entered national politics and made history by being the first Congress candidate to win the Rajgarh Lok Sabha seat. After a loss in 1989, he reclaimed the seat in 1991.

He served as the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister from 1993 to 2003. He is currently a Rajya Sabha MP and a permanent invitee to the Congress Working Committee. Over the span of decades, the 77-year-old has held various political portfolio in Congress. With extensive experience over the years in both state and national politics in Madhya Pradesh, Singh is a staunch critic of right-wing ideologies and politics.

The constituency had been one of the tightly contested seats between the Congress and the BJP till 2014, and since then there has been a significant surge in the vote share for the saffron party, following the waves created by the Prime Minister Modi.