Chhindwara, Nov. 14: From Mumbai to Nagpur by flight, then a 128km journey by bus. Then, with a soft rustle, onto the breakfast table of Union minister Kamal Nath, by 9.30am sharp, in a house deep into Madhya Pradesh’s tribal belt of Mahakaushal.

It’s a one-day-old copy of the International Herald Tribune, but has enough for the Union commerce minister to chew on.

“I have to know what’s happening in the world,” says Nath, who has skipped the G20 meeting in Washington to focus on the Congress campaign for the November 27 polls in his home state. The battle is being billed Kamal vs lotus (the BJP’s symbol).

The paper is more or less the “heaviest” stuff that lands on the Chhindwara MP’s table. Nath takes in the world situation over a bowl of sagoo, toast and aloo tikia.

It’s the only meal he’ll have till he returns home late in the evening to Shikarpur, Chhindwara, after a day spent in a helicopter and at campaign spots in remote villages. Unless his pilot friend, Captain S.K. Malikhas, can nudge him into having a diet cola, the 62-year-old politician survives the day chewing gum.

The tribals have dubbed the month-old Bell 407 chopper a cheel gari (kite car). From a helipad near his home, it takes Nath over Pench in Seoni district — the land of Mowgli made famous by Rudyard Kipling — to Ajnia, Mangli, Ramgarhi and Bonkatta.

He tells the rallies: “I want farmers protected; that’s what I do at international trade talks.” He then accuses the BJP government of corruption and inefficiency.

Nath admits that not many here know about the WTO, but says anti-incumbency and the focus on corruption are paying dividends. Nath is not the candidate for chief minister, yet almost everywhere in Mahakaushal, which commands 44 of the Assembly’s 230 seats, he is the party workers’ and officials’ choice.

At Mandla, Balaghat and Seoni, he is greeted with the slogan: “MP ka mukhya mantri kaisa ho, Kamal Nath jaisa ho (what kind of chief minister should MP have? Like Kamal Nath, of course).”

Nath says sheepishly: “It’s not an office I’m seeking. But if the workers feel so strongly, I can’t help it…. It’s for the high command to decide.”

Since 1980, Nath has lost from Chhindwara only once, in the 1997 bypolls. In the 2003 Assembly elections, however, the Congress lost from all the seven Assembly segments. Then Chhindwara again voted for Nath in the May 2004 Lok Sabha polls. Nath knows the challenge before him.