Pawar’s NCP gets a Pune jolt; left with three out of 21 seats

Baramati and two other seats are all the party is left with in Pawars’ district of 21 constituencies; heavy blows in Pune city.

Pune, the district that represented the face of the Pawars’ dominance of western Maharashtra, has given the NCP the most striking jolts in the region.

Of the 21 seats in the district, the NCP held seven while two others were associated with the party, though not elected on an NCP ticket. The party has now been left with only three seats. It is the losses in Pune that have set the NCP back in the region, where its tally has fallen from 24 of 70 seats to 19 .

One of the three seats the NCP won in Pune district is Baramati, where Ajit Pawar won comfortably. Among the other two is Ambegaon, won by former assembly speaker Dilip Walse-Patil. The third was unexpected, with the NCP wresting Indapur from Congress strongman Harshwardhan Patil in a close contest. The Pawars and the Patils have been contesting for over three decades for supremacy of the region.

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The setbacks in Pune have led to a spate of resignations, and calls for the sacking of a few leaders, for “serious introspection” in the face of a saffron surge and the rise of the MIM, and for adopting aggressive advertising techniques like the BJP does.

The NCP finished third in many seats. In those where it finished second, the margin was often high. “The Baramati and Ambegaon victories prove the NCP’s existence. The third one shows the NCP has it in it to make it big. But overall the results show the NCP has crumbled in its bastion like never before,” says analyst Sarang Kamtekar.

In Pune city, where the NCP rules the municipal corporation in alliance with the Congress, it held one seat, Vadgaonsheri, but the BJP has now swept all eight seats. In Kasba Peth in the city, the NCP candidate finished fourth. In Kothrud, the NCP candidate finished third. In Pune Cantonment, the NCP candidate was fifth, polling some 10 times less than the BJP’s.

In Pimpri-Chinchwad, where the NCP rules the civic body on its own, it lost all three assembly seats. Two of its candidates finished third. In 2009, one MLA was with the NCP and the other two associated with it, including Ajit Pawar’s aide Laxman Jagtap.

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The setbacks began during the Lok Sabha polls. In Baramati, one of the four Lok Sabha seats of the district, Supriya Sule saw her 2009 margin of 3.25 lakh votes slip to 70,000. In Maval and Shirur, the NCP lost by over three lakh votes.

Apart from the three new MLAs and the lone Lok Sabha MP, the NCP now has two MLCs and a Rajya Sabha MP from Pune. It continues to dominate the Pune zilla parishad with 45 members out of 75. It also controls a number of gram panchayats.

The NCP’s Pimpri-Chinchwad chief, Yogesh Behl, an aide of Ajit Pawar, has submitted his resignation owning responsibility for the defeats in the town. The party also plans to sack a few corporators who supported rival candidates in Bhosari and Chinchwad.

In a post on Facebook on Monday, Vandana Chavan, the NCP’s Pune president, called for drastic measures to tone up the party rank and file. “It is our worst debacle and we need to seriously introspect as to what went wrong. We need to take urgent corrective steps,” Chavan told The Indian Express on Tuesday.

Manoj Dattatrye More

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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