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BASTAR
The tribal-dominated Bastar constituency of Chhattisgarh will be A witness to a fierce battle for votes between Congress "tiger" and the "black diamond" of the BJP
The tribal-dominated Bastar constituency of Chhattisgarh will be witnessing a fierce battle for votes between Congress "tiger" and the "black diamond" of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The seat, considered prestigious in the state, is reserved for scheduled tribe candidates.
Congress has fielded its top tribal leader Mahendra Karma, who is the leader of opposition in the state assembly, to stop Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) Baliram Kashyap from scoring a hat-trick in Bastar.
The April 20 polls for the Bastar seat will be a repeat of the 1999 elections when both the leaders fought hard and finally BJP pulled off win by a margin of 20,737 votes.
But the Bastar tiger seems to be in a mood to settle scores this time.
There are more than one million voters in Bastar, where the voter turnout has always been less than 33 per cent.
Except the last two parliamentary polls held in 1998 and 1999, the Congress has always dominated the Bastar seat.
In the 1980 polls, its candidate Laxman Karma won by over 15,050 votes. In 1984, the party had stretched its lead to 76,310 votes. The Congress had won in Bastar in 1990, 1991 and 1996 as well.
The statistics in Bastar favour the Congress but the party needs to pull out all stops to defeat the BJP.
And the BJP says it plans to bag all the 11 parliamentary seats in the state.
As it has managed to stretch its base in the tribal belt, with a former Congress leader and federal minister Arvind Netam a popular tribal leader joining the party.
