Jyotiraditya Scindia looks on as Rahul Gandhi trips a bamboo barricade to meet tribals in Khitauli, Madhya Pradesh, on Sunday. (PTI)

Bhopal, April 28: Rahul Gandhi’s campaign tour of poll-bound Madhya Pradesh has won him an admirer who is unlikely to vote for the Congress.

Omprakash Dhurve happens to be a BJP MLA and a former state minister.

Rahul not only agreed to meet the Dhindori MLA when he dropped by without an appointment last evening, but listened patiently to his land-grab accusations against a powerful local Congress leader.

Dhurve today said he was deeply impressed by the Congress general secretary’s well-meaning approach and sincerity.

“That I was speaking against a Congress leader did not affect his attitude. He was attentive and seemed to have grasped the magnitude of the issue,” Dhurve said, adding that he hadn’t taken his party’s permission to meet Rahul.

Dhurve told the young MP that the local Congress leader, who had helped organise Rahul’s rally in Katni district yesterday, was patronising the mining mafia who were cheating tribals out of their mineral-rich land.

The Baiga tribals, who live in the forests of Dhindori in Mandla district, used to be hunter-gatherers but with the restrictions now, have shifted to bee-keeping and rearing of chicken and pigs.

“The mafia buy the plots, which cannot be sold to non-tribals, in the name of their tribal labourers and mine them. The uneducated Baigas are lured by free drink and small sums that are nothing compared with what their bauxite and magnesium-rich land should fetch,” Dhurve told The Telegraph.

The MLA said when he decided to take his “chance” at meeting Rahul, he wasn’t sure of getting an audience. “I told his SPG guards I need to see Rahul — I am an MLA and have urgent business.”

Within minutes, he was called inside the PowerGrid Corporation of India guesthouse.

“Now I wait to see how Rahul responds to the problem,” Dhurve said.

Why did he not inform the BJP leadership? Dhurve said there was no politics in this: “It’s a local problem for which I have sought help from a national-level leader.”

State Congress leaders were cautious about Dhurve’s allegation about their party leader, son of a former minister in the Digvijay Singh government. They said Dhurve had been dropped as a minister after the state’s lokayukta, or ombudsman, found him guilty of causing losses to the exchequer.

As food and civil supplies minister and chairman of the state civil supplies corporation, Dhurve had allegedly gone out of his way to help a contractor.

Faced with these “ground realities”, Rahul’s brief address at Khitauli village, Katni, dealt with problems of tribals.

“In one India — of Delhi, Indore and Bhopal — things are different while the other India is of tribals and the poor which I have visited. The voices of these people do not even reach the officials,” he said.

The posters at the venue and the banner behind the dais proclaimed: “Adivasi Adhikar Mahasabha” (tribal rights rally).

Snub to ‘show’

Yesterday, Rahul had, however, abruptly left a tribal hut in Chanda village, Dhindori, where he was to have dined and spent the night.

Party sources said the MP was “put off” by the arrangements the state Congress had made at tribal Pramila Kumre’s home.

The whole village had been given a whitewash and Kumre’s home was suddenly equipped with a power generator, gleaming cutlery and a meal brought from nearby Itarsi town, a busy railway junction boasting an army of caterers.

Rahul’s first meal at a Dalit home in Uttar Pradesh, virtually an impromptu decision, had been bereft of ostentation. But before his subsequent trips to tribal homes in Bundelkhand, the Congress had got them spruced up through self-help groups.

Yesterday, Rahul decided to walk off and spend the night at the PowerGrid guesthouse. Dhurve would have approved of the sincerity.