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Journalism of Courage
Pune district’s Shirur constituency, which has not elected a candidate twice in a row in the last four Assembly polls, is set for a face-off between the two factions of the Nationalist Congress Party as splits in that party, as well as the Shiv Sena, have brought about unseen alliances.
Shirur was won by the BJP’s Baburao Pacharne in 2004 and 2014 and by the undivided NCP’s Ashok Pawar in 2009 and 2019.
Ashok Pawar, who has remained with NCP founder Sharad Pawar’s faction after the party split last year, has been renominated as the Shirur candidate by the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi for the Maharashtra Assembly elections 2024. Dnyaneshwar Katke, the Shiv Sena (UBT)’s former district chief who joined Ajit Pawar’s NCP on Monday, is the ruling Mahayuti’s candidate.
In the recent Lok Sabha election, the larger Shirur seat was won by Dr Amol Kolhe of the NCP (SP) by beating the Ajit Pawar faction’s Shivaji Adhalrao Patil. He won by an overall margin of more than 1,40,000 votes and got 12,000 more votes than his nearest opponent in the Shirur Assembly segment.
The Shirur Assembly constituency includes villages such as Nhavare, Talegaon Dhamdhere and Bhima Koregaon, and the urban area of Wagholi in Pune city. It is one of the constituencies affected by the human-leopard conflict, having lost eight human lives to the problem in the Junnar forest division since March. In Wagholi, poor road conditions leading to frequent traffic snarls and long-standing water supply problems are the major issues.
