The bastion of Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar is under siege. The BJP top brass has pulled out all the stops to wrest the Baramati Lok Sabha seat, the stronghold of the Pawars since the NCP’s formation in 1999. The constituency is going to the polls on Tuesday.
The BJP has launched a major blitz to topple Supriya Sule, Mr. Pawar’s daughter who is seeking the mandate from Baramati for the third time. The constituency is at the centre of Mr. Pawar’s stronghold stretching through Maharashtra’s “sugar belt”.
In the struggle for supremacy in western Maharashtra, the fall of Baramati to the BJP could signal the political twilight of the Pawars, besides dealing a massive blow to the NCP in the State.
The BJP-Sena Mahayuti has fielded Kanchan Kul, wife of Rahul Kul, Daund MLA and member of the Rashtriya Samaj Paksha. Dhangar leader Mahadev Jankar, who heads the Paksha, lost to Ms. Sule by fewer than 70,000 votes in the 2014 Lok Sabha election.
Evenly matched
On paper, the BJP-Shiv Sena coalition and the NCP-Congress alliance appear evenly matched. Of the six Assembly segments, the rival camps holding three each. The BJP holds the critical Khadakwasla Assembly seat, which has the highest number of voters at 4.7 lakh. The Shiv Sena holds Purandar and Mr. Jankar’s party has Daund.
Vijay Shivtare, MLA for Purandar and member of the Devendra Fadnavis Cabinet, has vowed to defeats the Pawars.
The NCP holds the Indapur and Baramati segments (Ms. Sule’s cousin Ajit Pawar is the MLA for Baramati). The Congress hold the Bhor segment.
It took the BJP a long time to name Ms. Kul, who has a strong base in Daund and some rural pockets around Baramati but is a political novice. She belongs to a politically connected family, with her in-laws having been legislators in the past. She and her Sena allies have been frenetically campaigning to expose the allegedly “false” claims of the Pawars by highlighting the lack of development outside Baramati city.
But Ms. Sule has kept her calm throughout her campaign. “Ms. Sule has begun her campaign well in advance this time. Her gruelling, though low-key campaigning has focussed on a door-to-door connect with her constituents,” a local analyst says.
Extensive campaign
She has held extensive meetings not only in the rural parts of her constituency but has also targeted housing societies in the rapidly growing suburbs of Pune such as Khadakwasla and Dhayari. She has stayed away from personal attacks. Her promises include making Baramati “tanker-free” by addressing the acute water shortage through rejuvenating groundwater and focussing on child education.
“It is unfortunate that leaders aren’t addressing issues this election. My aim has been to address serious issues such as unemployment. Whatever our detractors say, people here are aware of our work,” she says.
BJP Minister Chandrakant Patil, in charge of Baramati, has an elaborate plan to storm the Pawar citadel. “We have aimed to increase our vote share in the Khadakwasla segment from 65,000 to 1.15 lakh by ensuring that the youthful IT crowd steps out to vote. Since we already hold Daund, we expect a major boost there as Ms. Kul hails from that part,” he says.
The BJP has also been active in attempting to cash in on the resentment harboured by senior Congress leader Harshavardhan Patil towards Mr. Ajit Pawar.
In a humiliating defeat in the 2014 Assembly election, Mr. Patil lost his stronghold Indapur to the NCP’s Dattareya Bharne, a protégé of Mr. Ajit Pawar. At the time, the Congress and the NCP fought the polls separately.
It was after the 2014 Assembly election that Mr. Kul caught Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis’s attention after he won the Daund segment. It was Mr. Fadnavis who was instrumental in restarting Mr. Kul’s dysfunctional sugar factory in Daund’s Bhima-Patas area with an eye on expanding the NDA’s presence in Baramati and thus threatening Mr. Pawar’s backyard.
