Madhya Pradesh: The Congress party in the state suffered a severe blow on Saturday. Brij Bihari Pateriya, a prominent congress leader of the Bundelkhand region and former MLA, joined the BJP. Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan gave the party membership to Brij Bihari Patariya, who was MLA from Deori in Sagar. Pateriya reached the CM’s residence on Saturday morning and took membership in the BJP party.
State’s Urban Development and Housing Minister and MLA from Sagar’s Khurai seat Bhupendra Singh was also with him on this occasion. Significantly, Brij Bihari Pateriya became part of the assembly in 1998 after winning the election on a Congress ticket.
Meanwhile, Congress has been facing difficulty in the state for a long time now. The no-confidence motion is considered the atom bomb of democracy, whenever it comes up for consideration in the legislative houses (Vidhan Sabha or Lok Sabha), the government gasps for breath. Going back to the flashback, in 2011, the first no-confidence motion was presented against the Shivraj government.
Its importance can be gauged from the fact that at that time the attack of the Congress was weakened in a strategic way by the deputy leader of the opposition, Chaudhary Rakesh Singh, switching sides to the BJP. But this time, during the debate in the House on the no-confidence motion brought against the Shivraj government, Congress did not face any such setback. It is heard that the ‘government’ had already got the news of the weakness of the proposal. The allegations of Congress were not so strong and factual that any crisis would have come before the government.