BHOPAL: With turncoat politician and Madhya Pradesh’s forest minister Ramniwas Rawat being the ruling BJP’s candidate in one of the two assembly bypolls in Madhya Pradesh on November 13, his former party and opposition Congress has started targeting him over the deaths of 10 elephants in the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve (BTR).“It’s sad that 10 elephants symbolising Lord Ganesha died at BTR ahead of Deepawali. We worship Lord Ganesha, but forest minister Ramniwas Rawat couldn’t protect the elephants, which had come from Chhattisgarh and Karnataka. The government should question careless forest officials,” LoP and former forest minister Umang Singhar said on Friday.State Congress chief spokesperson Bhupendra Gupta, too, raised the issue of the elephant deaths to corner Rawat, who is the BJP candidate from Vijaypur seat of Gwalior-Chambal in the November 13 byoll.Rawat is six-time Congress MLA from the seat from which he resigned after being made forest minister in the current BJP government in July 2024. He ended his decade-long association with the Congress during the Lok Sabha polls. Rawat will take on former BJP leader Mukesh Malhotra, a tribal, in the bypoll. The seat has a sizeable chunk of Saharia tribal voters. These voters who have largely been loyal to BJP, may rally behind the Congress candidate this time. The Vijaypur seat also houses the Kuno National Park, the first home of cheetahs after their re-introduction in Indian wilds in September 2022.Meanwhile on Friday, forest department staff at the BTR burnt standing Kodo millet crop, which was consumed in large volume by the 13-strong elephant herd on Monday in an agricultural field, hours before they started dying on Tuesday.
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