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Shiv Sena (UBT) leader says won’t campaign for NCP candidates in Bhosari and Chinchwad

Sachin Bhosale says the Uddhav Thackeray-led party will also not campaign for the NCP (SP) candidate in the Pimpri reserved constituency.

Chinchwad, Bhosari, Shiv SenaRahul Kalate will contest his third Assembly poll battle, taking on the BJP’s Shankar Jagtap in Chinchwad. (File)

Even as the Sharad Pawar-led NCP announced the candidatures of Rahul Kalate for the Chinchwad seat and Ajit Gavhane for the Bhosari seat on Sunday, the Shiv Sena (UBT), the party’s ally in the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi, has decided not to campaign for them.

“We will not campaign for all three candidates fielded by Sharad Pawar-led NCP in Pimpri-Chinchwad. We are stunned by the fact that not a single seat was given to the Sena,” Sachin Bhosale, president of the Sena (UBT) in Pimpri-Chinchwad, told The Indian Express.

The third candidate is Sulakshana Shilwant, whom the NCP (SP) on Friday announced as its candidate for Pimpri, a reserved seat that the party led by former chief minister Uddhav Thackeray was desperate to contest in Maharashtra Assembly elections 2024.

Bhosale said he would contest the Pimpri seat. “I will file my nomination. The entire Sena rank and file will campaign for me. They will not campaign for the MVA candidates,” he said.

Rahul Kalate will contest his third Assembly poll battle, taking on the BJP’s Shankar Jagtap in Chinchwad. His past two attempts were unsuccessful. However, in the 2019 elections he put up a good fight against Laxman Jagtap, who passed away last year. After Laxman’s death, the BJP fielded his wife Ashwini Jagtap and she won the seat. However, she has been replaced by Shankar Jagtap, Laxman’s younger brother.

In Bhosari, the Sharad Pawar-led NCP’s candidate, Ajit Gavhane, was in the Ajit Pawar-led NCP. He will take on Mahesh Landge, the two-time sitting MLA of the BJP. Both Gavhane and Landge are “gaonwallahs”, or sons of the soil.

A wrestler, Landge has already been campaigning for the last two-three months as he was confident of being renominated.

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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