‘Sacrifice a bit for democracy’: Amid Congress-NCP tussle over Pune LS seat, Sanjay Raut reminds them of Kasba win

NCP state chief Jayant Patil said the decision regarding who will contest the Pune seat will be taken at an MVA meeting through discussions.

Sanjay Raut, chief spokesperson of Shiv Sena UBT

Rajya Sabha member and Shiv Sena (UBT) Chief Spokesperson Sanjay Raut. (File)

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‘Sacrifice a bit for democracy’: Amid Congress-NCP tussle over Pune LS seat, Sanjay Raut reminds them of Kasba win

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As the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) have been locked in a tussle over which party will field a candidate for the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) alliance in the Pune Lok Sabha bypoll, the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena has called for “a little bit of sacrifice to save the Constitution and democracy”.

Sanjay Raut, chief spokesperson of Shiv Sena (UBT), told The Indian Express, “If we (MVA) adopt a Kasba Peth-like formula, then we will easily win the Pune Lok Sabha seat if elections are held there under the present circumstances. All three partners of the MVA were firmly united during the Kasba Peth Assembly elections. As a result, the MVA won the seat. If we come together in a similar fashion, we will win Pune as well.”

In the 2019 elections, the Shiv Sena led by Uddhav Thackeray, which was in alliance with the BJP, had won 18 Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra out of the 22 it contested. Raut hinted that the party was eyeing the same 22 seats.

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“The insistence on increasing the number of seats was unwarranted,” he said, referring to the demand from alliance partners for contesting a certain number of seats. “A little bit of sacrifice will help in saving the Constitution and democracy,” he added.

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On the other hand, Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) chief Nana Patole who had been silent on the Pune Lok Sabha seat issue so far, said his party should get to contest the seat based “on merit”. “We should not compare civic, Assembly and zilla parishad polls with Parliamentary elections. All three are different elections… The Congress has contested the Pune Lok Sabha seat in the past and won. We lost in 2014 and 2019. The atmosphere then was different and now it is different, especially after the victory of the Congress in the Kasba bypoll,” he said.