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Satara bypoll: Sharad Pawar’s rain-soaked speech drowns Shivaji descendant in own backyard

NCP leaders were quick to credit the victory to party chief Sharad Pawar, whose rally in pouring rain in Satara has became much-talked about in these elections.

Satara bypoll: Pawar’s rain-soaked speech drowns Shivaji descendant in own backyard NCP chief Sharad Pawar addressed a campaign rally amid heavy rainfall on October 18 evening at Satara in western Maharashtra, where a Lok Sabha bypoll was held alongiwth the state Assembly elections on October 21. (Source: Twitter)

IN a huge embarrassment, BJP leader Udayanraje Bhosale on Friday lost the Satara Lok Sabha bypoll by 87,717 votes to NCP’s Sriniwas Patil.

Since the initial counting rounds itself, Bhosale trailed Patil, a former Sikkim governor and a retired IAS officer. Though initially the margin was less, it first ballooned to 10,000, then went up to 30,000 and finally hovered around the 80,000 mark. In all, Patil received 6,15,008 votes while Udayanraje managed 5,39,241.

“I accept the verdict of the kings of democracy… the kings are the people who have ruled against me. I have worked selflessly for 20 to 25 years for the people of Satara, I also have a life… Now, I will keep quiet,” a stunned Bhosale said.

NCP leaders were quick to credit the victory to party chief Sharad Pawar, whose rally in pouring rain in Satara has became much-talked about in these elections.

The photographs of the rally, where a drenched Pawar addresses a rally, had gone viral, rustling up five lakh hits in first one hour.

Pawar, however, downplayed the event at a press conference on Thursday. “It was raining and some 50,000 people were waiting to hear me and had turned their chairs into umbrellas… I couldn’t have let them down. I don’t want to get into how it viral it became,” he said.

The NCP chief was also instrumental in picking his long-time friend Patil for the seat after senior Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan refused to contest from the constituency. Though the seat belonged to NCP as part of the seat sharing arrangement, the party had offered it to ally Congress provided Chavan is fielded.

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The Satara seat had fallen vacant after Bhosale resigned three months after being elected MP in May. In the Lok Sabha polls, his margin of victory had reduced drastically from 3.55 lakh votes in 2014 to 1.50 lakh votes. He had then decided to join BJP. He was the only leader from Maharashtra whose joined the party at an event in New Delhi in the presence of BJP chief Amit Shah.

Udayanraje’s supporters claimed he had been promised a Rajya Sabha seat in case the Satara verdict went against him. “We are confident Udayanraje will still become an MP…,” said Milind Gaikwad, a supporter.

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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