The appeal made by the Congress to the people of Indore to vote for NOTA seems to have had a significant impact. At the midpoint of the vote counting process, the number of NOTA votes in the constituency reached a record high of 2.18 lakh votes. This surpasses the previous highest NOTA count of 51,660 votes in Bihar’s Gopalganj during the 2014 general elections.
Despite the absence of any strong opposition, the BJP’s Shankar Lalwani emerged as the winner with a massive margin of 11,75,092 votes. In the 2019 elections, the Congress secured 31% of the votes in Indore, while NOTA received 0.31%.
The Congress campaign for NOTA votes in Indore involved various activities such as posters, torch rallies, meetings, and social media interactions. The party urged voters to teach the BJP a lesson for the last-minute withdrawal of their candidate, Akshay Kanti Bam.
Indore is the largest Lok Sabha constituency in Madhya Pradesh, with 25.13 lakh voters. The BJP has consistently won this seat since 1989. In the 2019 elections, the BJP secured a victory margin of 5.48 lakh votes and fielded its incumbent MP.
Prior to the deadline for withdrawal of nominations, Bam faced charges in a 17-year-old attempted murder case related to a land dispute. On April 29, BJP leader and Madhya Pradesh Cabinet minister Kailash Vijayvargiya announced that Bam had joined the party and withdrawn his nomination from the seat.
The murder charges prompted the Congress to claim that Bam had been coerced into withdrawing. Interestingly, approximately one week ago, the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s Indore Bench granted anticipatory bail to Bam and his father in relation to the case.
According to court records, the incident occurred on October 4, 2007, when Bam, his father Kantilal, Satveer Singh (the owner of a security agency), and two others trespassed onto agricultural land owned by Yunus Khan. They proceeded to assault Khan’s servants and set fire to the soybean crop.
In its order on April 24, the court stated that Satveer had fired at the complainant, posing a potential threat to Yunus’ life. This act could have resulted in a murder case being filed against them, thus attracting charges of attempted murder.