In Chhattisgarh, BJP wins all 5 Lok Sabha seats reserved for SC/STs

Raipur: The Bharatiya Janata Party has won all five Lok Sabha seats reserved for the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe candidates in Chhattisgarh.

The saffron party wrested one of these seats - Bastar- from the Congress, as per results announced on Tuesday.

Out of the total 11 Lok Sabha seats in the state, Bastar, Kanker, Raigarh and Surguja are reserved for ST category and Janjgir-Champa for the SC candidates.

The BJP on Tuesday won 10 of the 11 seats and the Congress managed to retain one seat.

Of the reserved seats, a major upset was witnessed in the Bastar Lok Sabha constituency where BJP's Mahesh Kashyap won by 55,245 votes against Congress' influential tribal leader and incumbent MLA Kawasi Lakhma.

In 2019, Bastar was among the two seats won by the Congress.

The Congress this time dropped its sitting MP Deepak Baij, the state party president. It fielded Lakhma, who was a minister in the previous Congress government in Chhattisgarh.

In Surguja, BJP candidate Chintamani Maharaj, a former MLA who switched over from the Congress before last year's state assembly polls, won by a margin of 64,822 votes against Congress' Shashi Singh.

In Raigarh, BJP's Radheshyam Rathiya won by a margin of 2,40,391 votes against Congress nominee Dr Menka Devi Singh, who belongs to the erstwhile royal family of Sarangarh.

In Kanker, BJP's Bhojraj Nag won by a margin of 1,884 votes against Congress candidate Biresh Thakur.

In 2019 also, Thakur lost from Kanker by a slender margin of 6,914 votes.

In the lone SC-reserved Janjgir-Champa seat, BJP's Kamlesh Jangde won by a margin of 60,000 votes by defeating her Congress rival and former state minister Shivkumar Dahariya.

All the reserved Lok Sabha seats were out of grasp of the Congress till 2019, since 2000 when the state was carved out of Madhya Pradesh.

The BJP had won 10 out of 11 seats in the 2004, 2009 and 2014 Lok Sabha polls in the state.

In 2019, Congress won two seats, including Bastar.

Talking to PTI on Tuesday, political observer R Krishna Das said the BJP has been traditionally performing well in the reserved seats in Lok Sabha elections since the formation of state.

"In 2004, 2009 and 2014, it won all the reserved seats in the state. Before delimitation in 2009, there were six reserved seats in the state - four for the ST and two for SC candidates," he said.

In 2019, the Congress managed to win Bastar (ST), but this time it could not repeat its performance there, he noted.

In the last year's state elections, the BJP put up a good show in tribal-dominated seats, winning 17 of the 29 assembly constituencies reserved for the ST category, he said.

Tribals comprise around 32 per cent of the state's population, mainly residing in Surguja (north Chhattisgarh) and Bastar (south Chhattisgarh) divisions of the state.

In the Scheduled Caste-populated seats, the Congress performed well in the 2023 assembly polls, winning six of the ten assembly constituencies reserved for SC candidates, but its performance in the Janjgir-Champa Lok Sabha seat remained dismal, Das said.