Mumbai: Congress leader Dhiraj Deshmukh, son of former Maharashtra chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, believes that the BJP’s growing dominance in his family bastion of Latur is a “temporary phase”. “People of Latur will now judge BJP’s performance as it has won the Zilla Parishad (ZP) for the first time in 30 years and the municipal corporation after ten years,” said Dhiraj, youngest of the three sons of the late Congress leader, speaking to PTI on Sunday. “My father too had lost an Assembly election from Latur once. But he was elected again later,” he said, calling the present setbacks as a “temporary phase”.
In the Latur civic body, of the 34 corporators of the BJP, 12 were ‘imported’ from the Congress, he pointed out. “If they are the largest party in the world, why do they have to take in people from other parties? The BJP doesn’t have its own candidates even for a municipal election,” he said. To a question on whether he will contest the 2019 Assembly election, Deshmukh, presently a ZP member, said he will fight the election if the party decides so. His eldest brother, Amit Deshmukh, is the Latur MLA, while the other brother, Riteish, is a Bollywood actor. “We will ensure the Congress gets highest number of seats in Latur district,” he said.
Discussing himself, Deshmukh said, from being a Youth Congress member to becoming a ZP member and now campaigning for the party in Karnataka has been a learning process. “Being a ZP member, one gets an understanding of schemes and policies for the last person in the society.