From shadow to spotlight, a leap to big league
Bharti Pardhi, a first-time MP from Balaghat, overcame setbacks to win the seat.
For much of her life, 56-year-old Bharti Pardhi wondered if her story would be characterised by near misses; by beginnings well-made that never found successful outcomes. She once enrolled in college but dropped out in a year. She first entered the political arena in 2002 in the panchayat elections, but lost by a solitary vote and was left shattered. It was a feeling she couldn’t shake for many months. And yet, this June, Pardhi finally found some deliverance — when she ascended the steps of Parliament as a first-time member of Parliament from Balaghat its was as one five women elected from Madhya Pradesh.
Born into an OBC family from Balaghat, Pardhi’s father was a doctor, and in 1984, she found admission at the Rani Durgavati University in Jabalpur, where she pursued a Bachelor’s in Home Science. Within a year though, Pardhi was married into a family steeped in politics. Her husband Kheersagar Pardhi was a farmer leader, while his grandfather Bhola Ramji Pardhi had a long and storied political history — elected as Balaghat MP from Jay Prakash Narayan’s Praja Socialist Party in 1962.
She dropped out of college in 1985, and for 15 years remained in the shadows of the men in her family, before she began taking her first fledgling steps in politics by the turn of the century. Here, too, for a while it seemed that her political career would end before it really began. In 2002, she contested the zila panchayat elections backed by the BJP in Balaghat. She was considered the favourite, she says, but when the ballots were counted, she lost by one vote. “I was shocked and depressed, and both naive and emotional. I couldn’t get over it for many months. But my family continued to support me, and more than electoral politics, I gave myself up for the BJP’s organisational work,” she said.
One Balaghat-based BJP leader said, “She got the attention of the seniors in the BJP in 2016 when she was part of the team that pushed for the digitisation of work in Lanji block, the second such in the country, and ensured the online connectivity of 37 panchayats.”
In 2022, she contested the corporator elections for the Balaghat again and won this time, but faced some disappointment when she was passed up for the post of chairperson. So, in 2024, when Pardhi was announced as the Balaghat nominee for the party, replacing the incumbent BJP MP Dhal Singh Bisen,she saw it as reward for years of work. “I never lost trust in my organisation. We have always been told that the party gives chances to those that work hard, and I was overjoyed when my name was announced. I felt proud that I was given the opportunity to take my families political legacy forward,” Pardhi said.
But apart from her family’s political heft in Balaghat, there was another reason got senior BJP leaders honing in on Pardhi — a long-term plan to promote an OBC woman leader from Madhya Pradesh, particularly from Balaghat, which has the highest number of OBCs in the state. Through data submitted to the Supreme Court during a hearing in 2022to justify the grant of 27% reservation for OBC’s, the state government had said that Balaghat, which borders both Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh, has a 65% OBC population, the highest in Madhya Pradesh, far above the state average of 51%.
“In 2003, when the BJP came to power in the state, Uma Bharti, who was an OBC from the Lodhi community, became chief minister. Since then, the BJP hasn’t had an OBC woman leader of significance in the state,” a senior BJP said, asking not to be named. “There have been other attempts before, but not always at the Lok Sabha level. In 2022, for instance, the BJP nominated Kavita Patidar as Rajya Sabha leader, and has tried to promote her. If you look at posters put up during the assembly and Lok Sabha elections by the party, Patidar always finds a place.”
Senior leaders also said that they had to counter two broad political narratives with urgency.
The first was to consolidate their OBC support in Madhya Pradesh, particularly since the Congress centred much of its campaign around caste mobilisation, accusing the BJP of attempts to tamper with the Constitution. The second was more local — in the 2022 assembly elections, popular OBC leader and chairman of the OBC commission Gauri Shankar Bisen lost from Balaghat, and there was damage-control to do. They zeroed went with Pardhi, from the influential Pawar community, and it bore fruit. She won by 174,000 votes, defeating her nearest rival Samrat Saraswat of the Congress.
The importance of the seat was clear, Pardhi said. “Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a rally in Balaghat in my support, and chief minister Mohan Yadav visited the constituency several times to campaign.”
“Pardhi is a humble worker and the party gave her a chance to take the vision of Prime Minister Modi forward. I think she will emerge as a good leader not only in Balaghat or Madhya Pradesh, but nationally,” BJP’s Balaghat-in-charge and cabinet minister Prahlad Patel said.
Political analyst Rahim Khan, who is based in Balaghat, said that Pardhi was a sharp speaker, and there were signs that her election to the Lok Sabha was only the beginning. “The way the BJP is promoting her; it looks like there is a long-term plan. What is key will be her performance in the constituency because the BJP has not renominated a candidate in Balaghat other than Gauri Shankar Bisen, who was once a two-time MP, but not consecutively,” Khan said.
The challenge ahead for Pardhi is clear — rally the OBCs in Balaghat and nurture her parliamentary seat, where the eight assembly segments lie on a knife’s edge as four each are controlled by the Congress and the BJP. “Balaghat is not well-connected with the railways and locals have to travel 45km to Gondia in Maharashtra to catch a train. We have the Kanha Tiger Reserve and eighty percent of the area is forested, with very little sources of income. Unemployment is an issue in the absence of industries apart from mining. We also have to deal with a Maoist influence because of a new zone — the MMC (Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh) they have created,” she said. “I will focus on all these problems, and improving the lives of people in Balaghat is my priority.”
