In a major turnaround, Nilesh Lanke defeats Sujay Vikhe-Patil in Ahmednagar

Lanke, a grassroots worker who has earlier with the Ajit Pawar group and now with the Sharad Pawar faction of NCP, emerged victorious and won the Ahmednagar Lok Sabha seat with a margin of 28,929 votes.

Lanke polled 6,24,797 votes while Sujay Vikhe-Patil polled 5,95,878 votes. There were 24 candidates in the fray. A total 13,22,195 valid votes were polled.

The Ahmednagar contest saw a bitter war of words between the two prime candidates. The Mahayuti candidate (Vikhe-Patil) even had to seek police protection during the election campaign.

Despite strong support from the top brass of Mahayuti including Prime Minister Narendra Modi who attended a mammoth rally organised by Sujay Vikhe-Patil, the son of Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil–a seven-time undefeated MLA from Shirdi who left the Congress to join BJP and is currently the Minister for Revenue in Maharashtra–was unable to secure victory.

The Ahmednagar constituency has been nothing short of a thriller and the nail-biting counting process and slow tabulation of data had both supporters of Vikhe-Patil and Lanke on tenterhooks.

The neck-and-neck contest initially had Vikhe-Patil in the lead with more than 2,800 votes. By the tenth round of counting, Lanke had taken a lead of more than 8,226 votes over Vikhe-Patil. However, the cumulative total showed that Lanke was in the lead after polling 3,11,606 votes while Vikhe-Patil polled 3,01,002 votes. By the end of the 18th round, Lanke had polled 4,67,904 votes leading against Vikhe Patil by 25,639 votes. Eventually, after the 27th round of counting, Lanke defeated Vikhe-Patil with a margin of over 29,317 votes.

Incidentally, Lanke was an MLA from the Parner Assembly constituency when he quit NCP (Ajit Pawar) camp to join the Sharad Pawar group. Lanke wanted to contest the Lok Sabha elections and and tried to get a ticket from the party but was unsuccessful. He then quit the Ajit Pawar group and secured a ticket from the NCP(SP) faction.

Why it has not been smooth sailing for Vikhe-Patil was people’s easy accessibility to Lanke, say various experts.

“He attends everyone’s calls, mixes with people unlike Vikhe-Patil who was largely unavailable,” claims noted social activist and political expert Adv Shyam Asava. Farmers protesting over onion prices and ban on exports apart from the Maratha reservation issue also fuelled people’s anger against the government.

During the election campaign too, Vikhe-Patil had sparked a language debate stating that he would refrain from filing his nomination form for the LS elections if the rival (Lanke) could list (Vikhe-Patil’s) achievements in the constituency in English/Hindi. Lanke refused to bite the bait and during his meetings with villagers would tell them, ‘Let people power prevail over money power’ and added that he could not speak English or had a father who was a political leader, but was a man of the ground and known for his work during the Covid-19 pandemic.