Nationalist Congress Party’s (NCP) Parth Pawar, son of NCP leader Ajit Pawar, filed his nomination on Tuesday from the Maval Lok Sabha constituency.
He is pitted against Shiv Sena’s sitting MP, Shrirang Barne. The seat goes to polls in the fourth phase of elections on April 29.
Both Mr. Pawar and Mr. Barne staged massive show of strength while filing their nomination papers in Pimpri-Chinchwad.
Later, both candidates, in a spirit of camaraderie, were clicked shaking hands together.
Mr. Pawar faces a particularly daunting challenge after Mr. Barne and his nemesis, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Pimpri-Chinchwad MLA, Laxman Jagtap, publicly patched their differences on Monday with the aim of defeating the NCP.
Like Baramati, where Supriya Sule, another member of the Pawar clan is contesting, the Maval seat is set to witness a keen contest.
At stake is the prestige of Mr. Ajit Pawar. Of the six Assembly segments in the Maval LS constituency, only one, Karjat, is with the NCP, putting the party — and Parth Pawar — at a grave disadvantage. Of the other seats, three are with the BJP and two with the Sena.
Meanwhile, in a startling assertion, senior BJP leader and Maharashtra Revenue Minister Chandrakant Patil claimed that the younger Pawar would withdraw eventually his nomination.
“Ajit Pawar was resting his hopes on the fact that Mr. Jagtap would covertly side with the NCP in a bid to see his adversary Mr. Barne defeated. But the equation has dramatically changed now as Mr. Jagtap’s followers will campaign for Mr. Barne,” Mr. Patil told The Hindu.
On Monday, both had held a press conference to announce that they would work in unison henceforth for the larger interests of the BJP-Sena ‘Mahayuti’ in the general elections.
“My allegations against him [Mr. Jagtap] were politically motivated and part of our party’s [Shiv Sena’s] strategy. I withdraw them in the interest of the alliance,” said Mr. Barne.
Mr. Jagtap, too, said that the differences between himself and Mr. Barne had never been of “a personal nature”.
Mr. Jagtap had trounced Mr. Barne in the 2009 Assembly election only to have the tables turned on him when the latter defeated the former in the 2014 Lok Sabha poll.
Yet, Mr. Jagtap again had his day after the BJP bagged three of Assembly segments – Maval, Chinchwad and Panvel – in the Maval Lok Sabha constituency during the 2014 Assembly election in October that year.
The defection of Mr. Jagtap — formerly the NCP’s mainstay in Pimrpi-Chinchwad — to the BJP in 2014, was followed by the exodus of top erstwhile NCP heavyweights like Bhosari legislator Mahesh Landge, and senior NCP leaders Azam Pansare and Yashwant Bhosale into the saffron party.
These ex-NCP satraps, especially Mr. Jagtap, became key architects of the BJP’s massive landslide victory in the crucial Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation poll in 2017.
The stunning win was a turning point in the political fortunes of the NCP – and especially Ajit Pawar’s – in Pimpri-Chinchwad, which was considered to be his impregnable bastion until then.