Not one to be bogged down, Congress's Bhupesh Baghel in revival mode

In a career spanning a little over three decades, the political fortunes of Bhupesh Baghel have remained perfectly in sync with the rise, fall, and rise of the Congress party in Chhattisgarh, which he has headed since 2014.

Starting out as a Youth Congress worker in undivided Madhya Pradesh in the mid-1980s, the 57-year old Kurmi Kshatriya leader served as chief of the Durg (rural) Youth Congress, before being elevated to the post of vice-president of the State Youth Congress in 1994.

Elected to the Madhya Pradesh assembly from Patan in 1993 and 1998, Baghel served as a minister of state in the Digvijaya Singh cabinet till the bifurcation of Chhattisgarh from Madhya Pradesh in November 2000.

Retained as a member of the Ajit Jogi cabinet, the father of four, served as minister for relief work, public health engineering and revenue till the ouster of the Congress from power in 2003.

Having retained the Patan seat despite a huge anti-incumbency wave in 2003, Baghel served as the deputy leader of opposition between 2003 and 2008. He lost the assembly elections from the constituency in 2008. His two forays in back-to-back parliamentary elections also failed to find favour with the voters.

While he contested for the Durg Lok Sabha seat in 2004, his continuing quest for a parliamentary seat ended in defeat in the urban Raipur constituency five years later.

Not one to be bogged down for long, Baghel bounced back into the state assembly from Patan in the closely-fought elections in 2013 which came close on the heels of a bloody massacre of top Congress leaders in the Darbha Valley of Maoist-infested Sukma district.

The unfortunate attack led to a leadership vacuum in the state Congress as most of the party frontline leaders were brutally murdered by Maoists on that fateful day.

The party suffered a massive drubbing at the hands of the ruling BJP in the ensuing Lok Sabha elections of 2014, months before Baghel was elevated as chief of the state Congress unit.

Entrusted with the task of reviving a party organisation decimated by successive BJP victories over the last decade-and-a-half, Baghel embarked on repeated tours to enthuse cadres and motivate voters across the 90 assembly constituencies in the state.

Often criticised for his assertive leadership style, chief minister-in-waiting Baghel is widely credited for creating the mise en scene, which will serve as the backdrop of the new Congress government in the state.