Bhopal: With the Lok Saba elections inching closer, the ruling Congress and opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are intensifying efforts to take credit of developmental projects and the fight is turning uglier by the day across Madhya Pradesh.
In the latest incident, hundreds of BJP workers, led by Morena MP Anoop Mishra, staged a violent protest outside an event venue where Congress MP Jyotiraditya Scindia laid the foundation stone of a 1,000-bed hospital in Gwalior on Tuesday.
According to the BJP workers, ex-chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had laid the foundation stone of the hospital in 2009 when Mishra was health and family welfare minister and the Congress is only trying to earn electoral mileage by doing the same thing again.
Police had to lathicharge and use water cannons to disperse the protestors. Mishra was later taken into custody along with about 500 other party workers.
Congress spokesperson Pankaj Chaturvedi said though land for the project was allotted in 2014, nothing happened in all these years.
The event was also interrupted by a 10-minute power cut.
However, this wasn’t the first incident of the Congress-BJP war over claiming credit.
On Monday, BJP’s Narela MLA and former minister Vishwas Sarang was booked by police for disrupting government work. Sarang had forcibly inaugurated a theme park built in his constituency
before public relations minister PC Sharma could do the same.
Sarang said the project was mooted and completed by him and he would write to the chief minister over this.
Days ago, Bhopal mayor Alok Sharma left a Yuva Swabhiman programme midway after he was allegedly not allowed to address the function. The chief minister was also a part of the event.
Sharma and BJP’s Bhopal MP Alok Snajar were also left sulking when they found their names missing from the list of invitees during the inauguration of a police station in Mangalwara in the old city area.
Another ugly scene was witnessed in Burhanpur district when BJP mayor Anil Bhosle unilaterally inaugurated an auditorium in the town in the absence of the local MLA who had left the Congress, but later extended support to the Kamal Nath government.
The authorities then locked up the auditorium saying the mayor wasn’t eligible to inaugurate the venue.
The state’s commercial capital, Indore, too hasn’t been spared of this Congress-BJP tussle.
On March 3, Indore mayor Malini Gaud, largely credited for the city’s top rank in the cleanliness survey, alleged that urban development and housing minister Jaivardhan Singh was sidelining her on public functions and wasn’t taking her calls.
Gaud accused Singh of flagging off electric city buses recently in her absence despite the fact she was the chairperson of the Atal Indore City Transport Service Company Limited.
She also slammed the minister for excluding the district collector’s name from the panel which is going to New Delhi for Swachhta Abhiyan-2019 award.
She has even accused the Congress of disrespecting Lok Sabha speaker Sumitra Mahajan who was recently scheduled to attend an inauguration of a garden in the city with her, but the government cancelled the event all of a sudden.
Jaivardhan’s father and senior Congress leader Digvijay Singh had visited the mayor’s residence after her public outburst and lauded Gaud’s ‘swachhta’ initiatives and wished her luck for the third consecutive cleanest city award.
Recently, 12 BJP mayors in the state accused the Congress government of discriminating against them and stalling the progress of their projects in their cities. The mayors alleged the government was conspiring against them and threatened to launch a statewide agitation over this.
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