After making Sule sweat it out, Jankar’s party trains guns on Ajit

While RSP is ready to go ‘all out’ in Pawar stronghold Baramati, deputy cm and NCP workers are confident of retaining the assembly seat.

On Sunday, Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar held a farmers’ rally at Someshwarnagar in Baramati constituency, which he has been representing for two decades now. Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leaders said this was Pawar’s first visit to his constituency — a family stronghold where NCP chief Sharad Pawar never lost an election in over four decades of his political career — in connection with the ensuing Assembly elections.

While Ajit Pawar seemed to be least worried about the result in Baramati, the Rashtriya Samaj Paksh — led by Mahadeo Jankar — promises to make things difficult for him. It has decided to go “all-out” against Ajit Pawar, taking the charges against him, especially in connection with irrigation projects, to the voters.

Jankar Sunday said his party wanted to contest the Baramati seat, for which a list of candidates had been prepared. “We have demanded 14 seats from Shiv Sena and BJP. At the most, we will scale down our demands to 10, but we will not come down even one seat below that,” said Jankar. “If Sena-BJP is not offering us the number of seats we want, we will be free to contest on our own,” said Jankar.

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However, though the Baramati seat figures high on the RSP’s priority list, Jankar said the party would campaign for the alliance candidate even if the seat did not come to its kitty.

During the Lok Sabha elections, he said, the RSP proved what it was capable of. “We did exceedingly well in all the Assembly seats in Baramati Parliamentary constituency. We trailed only in Baramati Assembly seat, but that is because we had concentrated hard on other Assembly seats,” he said.

In the Lok Sabha polls, Jankar lost to Supriya Sule, daughter of Sharad Pawar, by a margin of 70,000 votes. The margin was considerably low compared to the 2009 elections, when Sule had won by 3.25 lakh votes. In fact, Sule was trailing behind Jankar in the initial rounds of counting. So shocked was the NCP that Sule remained out of bounds for the media for days after the results and refused to discuss her reduced victory margin.

Spurred by the party’s good performance, Jankar has now decided to go “all out” in this election. Close associates said Jankar would be camping in Baramati and personally meet the voters to “send out a strong signal” in the constituency. “Jankar always relies on giving a personal touch to his campaign and this is the reason why voters get drawn towards him. And if he does this in Baramati this time, Ajit Pawar is in for some hard time,” said Sandeep Chopade, RSP’s Pune district president.

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“From (Ajit) Pawar’s controversial utterances to charges related to irrigation projects, we will place them all before the voters,” said Chopade.

However, the Ajit Pawar camp scoffs at any bid to capture the Baramati bastion. “In the Lok Sabha elections, NCP trailed in other Assembly segments but not in Baramati. We had a massive lead of 90,000 here… We don’t think these voters can be swayed by anybody,” said Sambhaji Holkar, NCP’s Baramati taluka chief.

“The Deputy CM is visiting Baramati for the first time in many days to interact with voters. We, the workers, are enough to ensure his victory. He need not even campaign here,” said Holkar. In 2009, Ajit Pawar had faced Shiv Sena’s Rajendra Kale. The Sena is likely to stake claim to the seat again, but Jankar said the seat should logically be given to the RSP because of its Lok Sabha poll performance.

Meanwhile, the Swabhmani Shetkari Sanghatana led by Raju Shetti too wants to contest from Baramati. “We also want to field our candidate from Baramati, besides Daund. But if Jankar’s party is fielding its candidate, we will not field our candidate. Instead, we will campaign for them,” said Shetti.

Manoj Dattatrye More

Manoj More has been working with the Indian Express since 1992. For the first 16 years, he worked on the desk, edited stories, made pages, wrote special stories and handled The Indian Express edition. In 31 years of his career, he has regularly written stories on a range of topics, primarily on civic issues like state of roads, choked drains, garbage problems, inadequate transport facilities and the like. He has also written aggressively on local gondaism. He has primarily written civic stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad, Khadki, Maval and some parts of Pune. He has also covered stories from Kolhapur, Satara, Solapur, Sangli, Ahmednagar and Latur. He has had maximum impact stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad industrial city which he has covered extensively for the last three decades. Manoj More has written over 20,000 stories. 10,000 of which are byline stories. Most of the stories pertain to civic issues and political ones. The biggest achievement of his career is getting a nearly two kilometre road done on Pune-Mumbai highway in Khadki in 2006. He wrote stories on the state of roads since 1997. In 10 years, nearly 200 two-wheeler riders had died in accidents due to the pathetic state of the road. The local cantonment board could not get the road redone as it lacked funds. The then PMC commissioner Pravin Pardeshi took the initiative, went out of his way and made the Khadki road by spending Rs 23 crore from JNNURM Funds. In the next 10 years after the road was made by the PMC, less than 10 citizens had died, effectively saving more than 100 lives. Manoj More's campaign against tree cutting on Pune-Mumbai highway in 1999 and Pune-Nashik highway in 2004 saved 2000 trees. During Covid, over 50 doctors were asked to pay Rs 30 lakh each for getting a job with PCMC. The PCMC administration alerted Manoj More who did a story on the subject, asking then corporators how much money they demanded....The story worked as doctors got the job without paying a single paisa. Manoj More has also covered the "Latur drought" situation in 2015 when a "Latur water train" created quite a buzz in Maharashtra. He also covered the Malin tragedy where over 150 villagers had died. Manoj More is on Facebook with 4.9k followers (Manoj More), on twitter manojmore91982 ... Read More

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