Nirmala Bhuria herself was elected to the Vidhan Sabha in 2013 general election. Kantilal Buria has been sponsored by the Congress. Both Dilip Singh Bhuria and Kantilal Bhuria represented this constituency for many times.

Dilip Singh himself won the election for six times five times as Congress ticket and once in 2014 on the BJP ticket. Dilip Singh left the Congress and joined the BJP.

Kantilal Bhuria has been a prominent Congress leader. He was member of the Manmohan Singh cabinet. He resigned from the cabinet and was named as the president of the MP Congress committee. He was removed from the presidentship after the most humiliated performance of the Congress in 2013 Vidhan Sabha elections.

Kantilal Bhuria served the Lok Sabha four times. His last tenure was from 2009 to 2014. Besides Ratlam-Jhabua by-election is being held in Dewas Constituency. Dewas was rendered vacant because of the death of the sitting BJP member Tukoji Rao Pawar.

BJP has fielded Gayatri Raje wife of Tukoji Rao. Rao hailed from the royal family of Dewas BJP is confident of retaining this seat.

The Dewas royal family has been representing this seat for three decades. Thus the popularity of the royal family gives guarantee of a walkover for the ruling party.

But the task has become difficult in Jhabua-Ratlam because of two factors-BJP's defeat in Bihar and the impact of the massive explosion in Petlavad in which 89 persons were killed.

Petlavad is part of this constituency. People are angry, as the main culprit, whose negligence caused the accident, has not been arrested so far. The accused was close to the ruling party. This factor many adversely affect the voting in this Constituency.

Some news papers brought out from the Constituency have reported that the BJP has stopped using the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to win over the support of the electorate. According to some reports pro-Modi poster, have been withdrawn from some areas.

Instead of focussing on Modi, the achievements of Chief Minister Shivraj Singh during his ten-year rule are being highlighted during the party propaganda. This being a tribal constituency the election is going on a low profile. Besides the BJP and Congress, the JD(U) has also fielded its candidate. The JD(U) candidate has been supported by all the non-BJP and non-Congress parties.

A JD(U) spokesman has indicated that Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar may come to appeal for JD(U) candidate. Though both the Congress and BJP working hard to win the Jhabua-Ratlam seat, it's clear that a lot will depend on which of two parties do a better booth management and bring maximum voters to the polling booth.

In fact, Congress candidate Kantilal Bhuria, who lost to Dileep Singh Bhuria in 2014 general election by a margin of over one lakh votes, had polled 1,38,600 votes more than the 2009 election in which he won the seat with ease. Kantilal lost by a huge margin of 1,08,357 votes because of a jump in voting percentage by 13% in the 2014 election.

The election commission data shows that in 2009, when the Congress won the election by 57,827 votes, he had polled 3,08,923 votes as against 2,51,096 votes of the BJP candidate. The total poll percentage in 2009 was around 50 with 63,74,29 people casting their votes as against the 12,51,597 voters in the constituency.

However, in 2014 Kantilal Bhuria lost the election by a yawning gap of 1,08,357 votes despite increasing his tally by 1,38,600 votes. Dileep Singh, on the other hand, polled 5,45,980 votes, which was more than 50% of the total votes polled, while Congress candidate polled 4,37,523 votes, which was over 40% of the votes. This happened mainly because the voting percent in 2014 election jumped by 13% and the voter who had not voted in 2009 election but voted in 2014, were largely in favour of the BJP.

'The difference between 2009 and 2014 election in Jhabua was large presence of the RSS in the latter election. In the past few years, RSS had made huge penetration into the tribal areas of west MP and upwards swing in vote per cent is also because of RSS' larger participation in the election in Jhabua and other tribal seats of west MP,' said a senior Congress leader, without wishing to be named.

State Congress spokesperson, KK Mishra, however, seemed optimistic. 'We are working on that. Our technical team is on the job to spread the party's network to each nook and corner of the constituency and we shall micro-manage voting better than BJP-RSS in this election,' he said. (IPA Service)