Ajit Pawar, Sharad Pawar’s nephew and number two in his Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), who is seeking a seventh term from the Baramati assembly constituency this year, is leading in the initial voting trends, according to data provided by CVoter.
The 60-year-old Ajit won by a margin of 90,000 votes over Prabhakar Gawade of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the last assembly election in 2014 in the assembly segment in the state’s Pune district.
This year the ruling BJP fielded Gopichand Padalkar, a leader of Dhangar community that has a significant presence in Baramati, against the senior NCP leader in the Maharastra assembly election held on Monday. Gopichand Padalkar’s Dhangar community is only second to the Pawars’ Marathas in numbers.
The reason behind the BJP’s decision to ‘import’ a leader like Padalkar into the five-decade-old Pawar bastion lies in his caste and the ruling party’s inability to groom a strong local leader.
And for Ajit Pawar, it is not simply about winning from Baramati, a prominent constituency in the sugar belt of western Maharashtra, but the margin by which that is achieved.
“I don’t want to sound overconfident, but I can give it in writing that my winning margin this time will be over one lakh votes,” Ajit Pawar had said at a press conference.
Just days after the assembly elections were announced, the Enforcement Directorate had named Ajit and Sharad Pawar in relation to an alleged loan fraud in the Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank.
Ajit had submitted his resignation as the Baramati MLA, citing the case against his uncle Sharad Pawar.
His party agitated against chief minister Devendra Fadnavis government and the BJP for filing the case in an attempt to galvanise its cadre ahead of Maharashtra assembly polls.
“After his recent resignation episode, Ajit’s popularity has gone up,” Amit Rajwanshi, a local journalist, had said while speaking to HT earlier.
The confidence of the Pawar family was evident in the party’s election campaign as well.
Ajit Pawar campaigned for only one day on the last day of the campaign and Sharad Pawar also chipped in.
Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis and the chief of the BJP’s state unit Chandrakant Patil campaigned for Gopichand Padalkar, who joined the BJP from the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) last month. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had held a rally in Baramati against Ajit Pawar in the 2014 Assembly polls.
Baramati, for many, is a shining example of development, with a rich network of co-operatives and sugar, automobile and dairy industries despite being drought-prone. The Pawar bastion also boasts a chain of educational institutes.
And the BJP tried to dent the NCP’s development claims by highlighting water scarcity and bad condition of roads in the Baramati assembly segment.
Whether Gopichand Padalkar will be able to do the job will be clear soon.
