Young leaders bring more seats to Congress in MP

Youthful Congress leaders helped the party in improving its political fortunes in Madhya Pradesh by defeating BJP's veterans.     

The poll victory has ensured a three-fold increase in the party's tally from four in 2004 to 12 in 2009.     

Even before the Lok Sabha polls were announced, analysts had a doubt that Congress will win more than four seats.

But the party played smart and sensed that there was resentment among the BJP cadres over the nomination of the party's sitting MPs from number of seats and therefore fielded relatively young candidates specially in the Malwa region.     

This resulted in the defeat of BJP veterans like eight-time MP Dr Laxmi Narayan Pandey from Mandsaur by Rahul Gandhi's trusted youth leader, Meenakshi Natrajan.   

It was Natrajan's maiden attempt in the electoral field and despite resentment among the Congress workers she won the election against Dr Pandey, to whom also BJP gave the ticket after a lot of bickerings in the party.     

Natrajan humbled BJP's veteran by a margin of 30,819 votes. Similar experiment paid rich dividends to the Congress in Ujjain, Dewas-Shajapur and Khandwa where people have voted against the BJP's over a decade old sitting MPs of the saffron party.