Dhangar leader Gopichand Padalkar, the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi’s (VBA) candidate from Sangli in the Lok Sabha polls, joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Monday.
Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said the BJP could field Mr. Padalkar in the Baramati constituency against Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Ajit Pawar.
“Gopichand fights like a tiger. If he is ready to fight from Baramati and if you (his supporters) are ready to fight, I will recommend his name to my party for this seat,” Mr. Fadnavis said, amid loud cheers from supporters at the Garware Club in south Mumbai.
Baramati Assembly is considered the bastion of the Pawar family, and in 2014, Mr. Pawar won the seat with the second largest margin in the State, of around 80,000 votes. The BJP has been claiming that it will defeat Mr. Pawar this time.
Mr. Padalkar, who contested the 2014 Assembly elections as a BJP candidate, joined the Prakash Ambedkar-led VBA earlier this year. Though he could not win the Sangli Lok Sabha contest against the BJP candidate, he polled over three lakh votes.
On Monday, Mr. Padalkar minced no words in attacking Mr. Pawar, though he did not name anyone. “There are people who cry after receiving just one notice,” he said, in an apparent reference to Mr. Pawar breaking down at a press conference on Saturday after resigning as MLA. The NCP leader was served a notice by the Enforcement Directorate in the alleged scam at the Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank.
Mr. Padalkar said, “Before 2014, I was accused of petty thefts, including stealing mangalsutra . But I continued to fight for my Dhangar community. No one can fool the voters with emotional speeches. Spend at least one day in jail — like I did when I was thrown in prison several times by the government before 2014 — then talk about being wrongly accused.”
Mr. Pawar, meanwhile, said Mr. Padalkar has every right to contest from wherever he likes. “We never underestimate our opposition. I am yet to be given a ticket by the party. But whoever the party fields will win this seat (Baramati) by a margin of more than one lakh,” he said.
He said only the BJP can do justice to the demands of the Dhangar community. Dhangars have been demanding the ST status, which the BJP had promised to fulfil in its first Cabinet meeting if it came to power in 2014. But the State government is yet to make public the report prepared by the Tata Institute of Social Science on the subject, and a related case is pending in the Bombay High Court.
At the same time, elected representatives from the ST category have opposed the Dhangar community’s demand. To appease both sides, the BJP-led State government announced schemes worth ₹1,000 crore for the Dhangars, prior to announcement of polls.
Congress MLA joins too
Also joining the BJP on Monday was Kashiram Pawara, Shirpur (ST) MLA of the Congress. Mr. Pawara is a close associate of senior Congress MLC and former minister Amrish Patel from Dhule district.
BJP State unit president Chandrakant Patil said, “With Kashiram Pawara joining the party, I am hopeful of Amrish Patel also joining us in the coming days. We are planning to hold another such function to welcome more leaders.”
