PAWAR POLITICS ON A SLIDE AFTER POLL DRUBBING

PUNE Barely a day before campaigning for Maharashtra’s civic body elections ended, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) president Sharad Pawar addressed a rally in Pimpri-Chinchwad where he likened Devendra Fadnavis to a blind man putting his hands on genitals, an adage often shared in rural Maharashtra.

Though Pawar left the adage incomplete, it reflected his desperation and perhaps even a sense of foreboding about an imminent rout in a town he, and later his nephew Ajit, controlled for years.

On Thursday, as the election results started coming in, it became clear that the Pawar anxiety was not misplaced — the NCP’s seats in the PimpriChinchwad Municipal Corporation fell to a mere 36 from 84 in 2014. A side note to the NCP’s decimation: it came a day after Pawar completed 50 years in electoral politics. But more importantly, the BJP managed to raise its own tally from 3 to 78, indicating that this industrial town had turned saffron in a few years. Till two years ago, the BJP was finding it difficult to search candidates. But the 2014 assembly elections changed that scenario when BJP led by Devendra Fadnavis devised a strategy to poach confidants of Pawars.

In Pune, too, the BJP grew from 26 in 2012 to 98, dislodging the NCP. Having lost power at the Centre and the state in 2014, the NCP had a make-or-break fight to maintain hold over Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporations. By losing both, the NCP has lost its last bastion in urban Maharashtra.