Within days of it completing its first year in office, the ruling Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) consolidated its position in Maharashtra on Friday, as it handed out a humiliating drubbing to the Opposition BJP by winning four out five Maharashtra Legislative Council seats in the biennial elections.
The BJP, which lost power to the Shiv Sena-led MVA Government in November last year, found itself licking its wounds, as it lost its traditional bastion of Nagpur where the Congress’ Abhijit Wanjari defeated the BJP’s Sandeep Joshi in the Nagpur Division Graduates’ constituency, by a comfortable margin of 18,910 votes.
The BJP’s debacle in the Nagpur Division Graduates’ constituency should be seen in the light of the fact that it was represented in the past by senior party Minister and Union Minister Nitin Gadkari and former Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis’s father Gangadharrao Fadnavis in the past. Gadkari, it may be recalled, had won this seat for four terms since 1989 before he contested successfully the 2014 Lok Sabha election from Nagpur.
The three other seats that the MVA won were: Pune Division Graduates’ seat, Aurangabad Division Graduates’ seat and Pune Division Teachers’ seat. While the NCP’s Arun Lad defeated Sangram Deshmukh of the BJP in Pune Division Graduates’ seat, the NCP’s Satish Chavan trounced the BJP’s Shirish Boralkar to bag the Aurangabad Division Graduates constituency seat.
In Pune Division Teachers’ constituency, Jayant Asgaonkar of the Congress trounced sitting MLC and Independent Dattatraya Sawant.
The BJP’s debacle in Nagpur and Pune Division Graduates’ seat came as an embarrassment for the BJP, as the poll results were personal setbacks for former chief minister Devendra Fadnavis and State party president Chandrakant Patil respectively.
However, the Shiv Sena — which leads the MVA in the State — suffered a defeat in Amravati Division Teachers’ constituency seat, its candidate Shrikant Deshpande was defeated by an Independent Kiran Sarnaik there.
The State Council biennial elections had been necessitated by the end of the tenure of the five sitting members in July this year, but the polls were postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Meanwhile, the only consolation that the BJP derived on a day it fared badly in the biennial elections was that its nomiee Amrish Patel won the by-election to Dhule Nandurbar Local Bodies seat. Patel had given up the seat, after he quit the Congress and joined the BJP, which necessitated the by-election.
In the State Council, the BJP has a strength of 22 members, while the seat tallies of other parties are: Shiv Sena-14, NCP-nine, Congress — eight, RSP, PWP and Lok Bharati Party — one seat each and Independents: four.
With the elections to five seats from the teachers’ and graduates’ quota and one seat from the local body constituency over, what is remaining is the nomination of 12 members from the Governor’s quota. The MVA has already recommended its nominees, including Bollywood actress Urmila Matondkar, for the 12 vacant seats.
NCP president Sharad Pawar hailed the MVA’s victory, saying: “The result is a reflection of the MVA Government’s performance in the last one year”. Reacting to his party’s poor performance in the polls, former Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said, “The results that have merged are not as per our expectations. We had expected more seats. Our calculations went wrong”.