Meenakshi Natrajan : Rahul Gandhi Camp
Meenakshi Natrajan : M.P. Mandsaur constituency
When it comes to winning an election, age and experience may fail to withstand the onslaught from someone who is young and totally inexperienced.
This is the lesson that can be drawn from the victory of 35-year-old Meenakshi Natarajan who defeated her rival Laxmi Narayan Pandey of the BJP by around 30,000 votes from the Mandsaur constituency.
But what these stalwarts could not do, Meenkashi has achieved and she is now a Lok Sabha member.
She looks everything but a politician. Newly elected Lok Sabha member, Meenakshi Natrajan prefers to lug her own baggage at the railway station and has no airs about herself.
The 36-year-old Congress leader, considered close to Rahul Gandhi, prefers a simple life.
Lugging two bags over her shoulder and rushing to Platform No.3 of Nizamuddin station here to board a train to her Mandsaur constituency, 84 km from Bhopal, she feels politics is a route to reach out to the 'aam-admi'.
"Till now, I was working for a particular group (NSUI -- the students' wing of Congress). But now the canvas will be larger and the experiences learnt will be put to test," Ms. Natrajan told PTI.
Carrying a tiffin box and dressed in a simple cotton salwar kameez, the be-spectacled biochem post-graduate looks everything but a politician.
Asked how a South Indian could win a seat that the Congress could not in the last 25 and that too in a BJP-ruled state, Ms. Natrajan shot back "though my origin may be South India, I was born and bought up in Madhya Pradesh just like my mother. I have always represented the state at all party fora."
