The prestige battle of Baramati in Maharashtra has the NCP’s Ajit Pawar in the lead over his nephew and NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar leader) Yugendra Pawar.
The contest is very important for the 65-year-old Ajit Pawar – who split the Sharad Pawar-led NCP last year and walked across the aisle to the ruling BJP-Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde) coalition – because of his wife Sunetra Pawar’s loss to his cousin Supriya Sule in the Baramati Lok Sabha seat earlier this year.
Baramati is a stronghold of the Pawar family.
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This year’s Maharashtra Assembly elections are a battle of survival for both factions of the NCP, who are out to prove that they have the support of voters. The Lok Sabha polls were a setback for the Ajit Pawar group, which had managed to win only one out of the four seats it had contested. The Sharad Pawar-led NCP had, however, put up a dominant show and won eight of the 10 constituencies it had put up candidates in, emerging as the party with the best strike rate in the state.
The stupendous performance had prompted the Sharad Pawar-led group to proclaim that it was the real NCP despite the Ajit Pawar faction being given the original name and symbol of the party. In a few short months since the Lok Sabha results in June, however, the ruling Mahayuti seems to have gained momentum on the back of schemes like the Ladki Behen Yojana and the contest between the two NCPs was seen to be a much closer one this time.
