Maharashtra: New Assembly has 24 women, four more than last time

Despite a 33 per cent political reservation, only 235 women were in the fray in the 2019 state polls. Among the elected women MLAs, Congress’s Praniti Shinde secured a hat-trick from Solapur City Central seat, while Manisha Chaudhary of the BJP won by the highest margin of over 64,000 votes from Dahisar seat.

Written by Manoj Dattatrye More

Pune | October 27, 2019 08:23 AM IST

4 min read

Pune Mayor Mukta Tilak won from Kasba.

As many as 24 women, including one independent, have made it to the new Legislative Assembly, four more than the outgoing House. Of the 24 women MLAs declared elected on October 24, 12 belong to the BJP, while five are from the Congress, four from Nationalist Congress Party, two from Shiv Sena and one Independent. The BJP-Shiv Sena had settled for 164-124 seat-sharing formula for the Assembly polls, the Congress-NCP had contested on 125 seats each. None of the 24 elected women belongs to the Muslim community.

While the Congress-NCP did not field a single Muslim woman candidate in the state polls, NCP’s state spokesperson Nawab Malik offered no explanation. Congress state spokesperson Sachin Sawant, meanwhile, said they couldn’t find a strong woman Muslim candidate, “but we already have a woman Muslim MLC”.

The VBA had fielded 28 Muslim candidates, all of them male. The party failed to win a single seat in Assembly elections. Of the 44 candidates fielded by the AIMIM, at least four were women. Party’s state chief Imtiaz Jaleel said they tried their best to get women candidates elected, “…but couldn’t succeed”. The AIMIM has made inroads in North Maharashtra, winning two seats in Malegaon Central and Dhule City, but failed to save its own turf of Aurangabad Central and Byculla.

Decrying the “double-standards” of political parties, Jaleel said, “On one hand parties talk about reservation for women and empowering them, on the other hand, there is little effort towards getting women representation in state legislature.”

Namita Mundada, who won on a BJP ticket from Kaij seat in Beed district, had switched to the party from the NCP just after party chief Sharad Pawar announced her as its candidate from Beed. Her mother-in-law Vimal Mundada was a minister in the Congress-NCP government. “Though NCP chief had himself announced my name, there was no end to the internal fighting in the party. Therefore, I had to quit the party,” she said.

BJP’s sitting MLA Seema Hirey, who won from Nashik West seat, had faced strong opposition from Shiv Sena corporators of Nashik Municipal Corporation. As many as 26 of them had resigned as a token of protest against her candidature, and backed Sena rebel candidate Vasant Shinde, who came a distant fourth in the election. Hiray secured 77,801 votes, while her nearest rival Apoorva Hiray (NCP) won 67,979 votes. MNS candidates polled around 25,000 votes. Congress’s Varsha Gaikwad won from Dharavi seat for the fourth consecutive time. Geeta Jain is the only woman independent candidate to get elected. She defeated Narendra Mehta of the BJP by over 15,000 votes from Mira Bhayander seat.

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Seema Savale, who contested as an independent candidate from Amravati seat, but lost, said, “The number of elected women MLAs is not even 10 per cent of the total strength of the House. But this number is good enough to create enough noise in the House.”

Pune Mayor Mukta Tilak, who won from Kasba constituency, said she will remain the mayor till December 15. “No, I don’t have to resign (as mayor)…I can hold MLA’s post as well.”

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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Maharashtra Assembly elections Pune Mayor