Denied ticket, sitting BJP MP from Jalgaon Unmesh Patil reaches out to Shiv Sena (UBT)

After the meeting, Patil told the media, “I have known Raut for many years, and we have worked closely in Delhi. I was in Lok Sabha, and Raut was in Rajya Sabha. The meeting was not political.”

However, highly placed sources in Shiv Sena (UBT) indicated that party chief Uddhav Thackeray, too, would likely meet Patil soon and decide on whether to field him as the candidate from Jalgaon, which goes to poll in the third phase on May 7.

In 2019, Unmesh Patil won with a margin of more than 4 lakh votes from Jalgaon. While he got 7.13 lakh votes, the second-placed Gulabrao Deokar of the Nationalist Congres Party (NCP) got 3.02 lakh votes. In 2014, Unmesh Patil was elected as an MLA from the Chalisgaon constituency in Maharashtra and served as the chairman of the Maharashtra State Cooperative Sugar Factories Federation Limited from 2015 to 2019.

In the list of 20 candidates released two weeks ago, the BJP replaced Patil with Smitha Wagh as its Jalgaon candidate, thus sending a clear message to the sitting MP that he was dropped. The decision was expected as there was an anti-incumbency factor against the first-time Lok Sabha MP.

Smita Wagh had served as the president of the BJP’s women’s wing before becoming a Legislative Council member in 2015. In the last Lok Sabha polls, too, she was in the reckoning for the Jalgaon seat, but Patil got the nod in the end.

Jalgaon is a BJP bastion, as the party has won all successive Lok Sabha elections here from 1999 to 2019. From 1991 to 1996, Gunwantrao Sarode represented Jalgaon. Y G Mahajan won in 1999 and 2004, Haribhau Jawale in 2007, and A T Patil in 2009 and 2014. In between, Ulhas Vasudeo Patil of the Congress won the seat in 1998.