Ujjwal Nikam first shot to fame when he was picked by the government as special public prosecutor in the serial Mumbai bombings of 1993. (Express File Photo by Prashant Nadkar)
A day after state urban development minister Eknath Shinde held a closed-door meeting with him in Jalgaon on Saturday, advocate Ujwal Nikam, the special public prosecutor in several high-profile cases, denied he was joining any political party.
“No, I am not joining any political party,” Nikam told The Indian Express, when asked if he had received an offer from the Shiv Sena. “I have good relations with political leaders. We keep meeting each other… Shinde (Shiv Sena leader Eknath Shinde) was on a tour of Jalgaon. We met, had a chat… but not on political issues. The Sena leader did not make an offer to me to join the party,” Nikam added.
Asked how many parties had approached him, Nikam said, “The NCP is the only party that had approached me during the last Lok Sabha elections. I was even offered the ticket to contest the LS polls. I had refused the offer,” he said, adding, “even another Sena leader Sanjay Raut had met me at my residence last month. It was a personal visit and not political.”
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Asked if there was a possibility of him joining any political party in the future, Nikam said, “I can’t speak about the future in the present. If anything has to happen, it will happen at that moment. It is futile to talk about what is going to happen in future. Let us live in the present, I am not joining any political party, that’s for sure.”
Stating that he had friends in all political parties, but had never taken sides or compromised with his profession, Nikam said, “When the Congress was in power, both in the state and Centre, I had fought against Sanjay Dutt in the arms possession case. Similarly, I had also fought a case against Sena supremo Balasaheb Thackeray.”
Asked which party he followed or was close to his heart, Nikam said these were personal matters and should be kept secret.
When contacted, Sena chief spokesperson Sanjay Raut denied that the Sena was seeking to rope in Nikam. “No, there is no truth in it. We have not approached Nikam to join the party. Shinde had met Nikam, that is true, but it must be for personal reasons. I had also met Nikam last month, we discussed general issues and not political,” he said, adding, “the Sena has no plans to make the special PP (public prosecutor) an offer to join the party.”
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He also denied speculation that the Sena was planning to offer Nikam a Rajya Sabha seat.
Nikam first shot to fame when he was picked by the government as the special public prosecutor in the serial Mumbai blasts of 1993. After that, he fought several high-profile terrorism and murder cases, including the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack case, Gulshan Kumar murder case and Pramod Mahajan murder case.
A BJP leader said the Sena was looking at Nikam’s legal expertise as some of its leaders were facing probes from central agencies. “The ED (Enforcement Directorate) is already investigating one Sena leader and soon a Sena minister will also face an ED probe,” the leader added.
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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