Baramati MP Supriya Sule said she accepts people's verdict and will analyse what went wrong. (Image: X)
Moments after the crushing defeat of Maha Vikas Aghadi in the Maharashtra assembly polls, Baramati MP Supriya Sule, daughter of NCP (SP) national president Sharad Pawar, said that at this point of time, she would not want to indulge in any blame game but would rather accept people’s verdict and analyse what went wrong.
”We live in a democracy and we will have to accept people’s verdict. I accept people’s verdict..,” Sule said.
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While the MVA could manage to get only 50 plus seats out of the 288 state assembly seats, her own party, which it was widely believed would spring a surprise as it did during the Lok Sabha elections, fell far shortt of the mark. The MVA was banking heavily on NCP (SP), a party which had otherwise delivered a sterling performance during the Lok Sabha elections.
Sule said that while she accepted the verdict, the MVA constituents will have to sit back and analyse what went wrong and why it failed to put up a fight. ”We will have an analysis as to what went wrong between the Lok Sabha elections and the assembly elections. In the Lok Sabha elections, we won 31 seats despite the all-out effort by the BJP-Mahayuti to defeat us. And therefore we need to introspect and analyse the reason as to how the momentum slipped out of our hands,” she said.
Sule said that at this point she wouldn’t like to put the blame on the Ladkhi Bahin Yojana, which the Mahayuti leaders said proved to be game changer, or the distribution of money to purchase votes by the ruling parties. ”They did affect the voting pattern, but I wouldn’t like to hold them fully responsible for our defeat. As I said, this needs a thorough analysis to pinpoint the exact reason as to when we failed,” she said.
Sule also did not seem to agree with other Maha Vikas Aghadi leaders about the EVM tampering or sudden five to six per cent increase in voting compared to the Lok Sabha elections. ”I will not comment about it now… The results have just come in… We will have to go through them and find out the reasons,” she said.
Asked whether the bickering among MVA constituents over seat-sharing and chief ministerial post sent out a wrong signal among voters, Sule said, “I don’t think this must have affected our performance… But it needs to be looked into.”
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On whether the MVA will remain intact, Sule said, “Why not ? Such things happen during elections. One has to get up and get cracking for the sake of the people of Maharashtra… MVA will remain firm and united. We will regroup, reunite and continue to serve the people of Maharashtra… So what… are we out of power? We shall continue to be in the hearts of the people of Maharashtra and we will always remain at their beck and call..”
As for Yugendra Pawar’s defeat from the Baramati seat, Sule said he might have been defeated, but the opponent’s lead has come down drastically, suggesting that it was a moral victory for her nephew. “Last time, Ajit Pawar had won by more than 1.50 lakh votes. And now, I think the margin of victory has reduced drastically. The final result is yet to come though,” she said.
Yugendra was contesting his first election while Ajit Pawar was contesting his eighth election. Ajit Pawar has never lost the election from Baramati, be it assembly or Lok Sabha election.
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.
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