The verbal duel triggered after Ajit Pawar met Rohit Pawar in Karad where both turned up to pay respects at the memorial of former Deputy Prime Minister Yashwantrao Chavan.
Speaking to reporters, Rohit Pawar (Right) admitted that he would have lost the election if his uncle had held a rally in the constituency. (PTI)
TWO days after the assembly poll results gave Mahayuti a landslide victory, a verbal duel erupted between the Ajit Pawar-led NCP and the BJP. The actors in the bickering bout include Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar and his nephew Rohit Pawar on one side, and BJP’s defeated candidate professor Ram Shinde on the other.
The verbal duel triggered after Ajit Pawar met Rohit Pawar in Karad where both turned up to pay respects at the memorial of former Deputy Prime Minister Yashwantrao Chavan.
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When they came to face to face, Rohit Pawar touched the feet of Ajit Pawar and took his blessings. Ajit Pawar put his hand on Rohit’s shoulders and told him that the result in Karjat-Jamkhed seat would have been different had he held a rally for a BJP candidate. ”Bach gaya (you won by a narrow imagine)…If I had held a rally, imagine what would have happened ?,” said the NCP chief.
Rohit Pawar was fielded by Sharad Pawar-led NCP from Karjat-Jamkhed seat in Ahilyanagar (Ahmednagar), where he defeated BJP candidate professor Ram Shinde. Shinde, a former minister, had lost to Rohit Pawar in 2019.
After Ajit Pawar made the comment, Rohit Pawar conceded that he would have lost had his uncle held a rally. ”If Ajit Pawar had held a rally, something up and down would have happened. I might have even lost the election. But my uncle was so busy in Baramati that he hardly had any time to hold a rally here,” he told reporters. As for his touching Ajit Pawar’s feet, Rohit reasoned that ”it is part of our culture to touch the feet of our elders.”
A few hours later, professor Ram Shinde alleged that a well-planned conspiracy was hatched against him. ”From the statement made by Ajit Pawar today, it is clear that it was a well-planned conspiracy against me. I had sent him a message on November 7, urging him to hold a rally. He kept promising that he will hold a rally but never came. He did not respond and today he revealed that he deliberately stayed away from the rally. It seems like there was an agreement in his family. He did not follow Mahayuti’s dharma (of coalition),” he said.
For a good measure, Shinde said the landslide victory of Mahayuti is because of Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis. ”Fadnavis is our leader and he will become the Chief Minister,” he said.
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Responding to professor Shinde’s criticism of Ajit Pawar, Rohit Pawar said, ”He (Shinde) is frustrated because he has been defeated. If Ajit Pawar did not attend his rally, did other BJP leaders such as Devendra Fadnavis and Amit Shah hold rallies (for him)?,” he asked.
The counting of votes in Karjat-Jamkhed Assembly constituency saw a ‘see-saw’ battle before Rohit Pawar defeated Shinde by a margin of 1,243 votes. Across Maharashtra, nine other candidates won with similar margins of around 1,000 votes or less.
Meanwhile, Maharashtra NCP president Sunil Tatkare said, ”It is wrong to accuse Ajit Pawar of not rallying in Karjat-Jamkhed. The NCP and Ajit Pawar put in their might for the victory of all Mahayuti candidates.”
‘Why was my own nephew fielded against me’?
Meanwhile, Ajit Pawar also said on Monday that the NCP (S-P) had no reason to field his own nephew against him.
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”Yugendra is a businessman. He has nothing to do with politics. They fielded my own brother’s son against me. I was tired of repeatedly saying that I erred during the Lok Sabha elections (in fielding his wife). If I erred, does it mean, they should field our own family member against me ?,” asked Pawar while speaking to reporters in Karad.
Ajit Pawar defeated his nephew Yugendra Pawar by a margin of over one lakh votes. Despite the fact that Yugendra and his other family members sought votes in the name of Sharad Pawar, Baramatikars rejected him and elected Ajit Pawar for his eighth term.
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.
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