NCP leader Ajit Pawar wins Baramati Assembly seat, deposits of opponents forfeited

Even as Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena alliance has swept the Maharashtra Assembly elections, the ruling party’s attempt to defeat former deputy chief minister and NCP leader Ajit Pawar has failed miserably as he won from the Baramati assembly seat by a huge margin of 1,65,265 votes.

Ajit Pawar, the nephew of NCP president Sharad Pawar, polled 1,95,641 votes, while his nearest rival, Gopichand Padalkar of the BJP, bagged just 30,376 votes. The total votes received by the BJP leader are less than 16 per cent, the minimum amount required to recover the security deposit.

There were 9 people who were trying their luck from this seat but all of them lost their deposits.

According to NCP office-bearers, this was a record-breaking victory margin for Ajit Pawar in Baramati, a bastion of the Pawar family in western Maharashtra’s Pune district.

In 2014, Ajit Pawar had won from the seat with a margin of 89,791 votes. With this thumping victory, Ajit Pawar retained Baramati for a sixth straight term.

The Sharad Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party(NCP) not only improved its performance in Maharashtra but fared even better than senior partner Congress by contesting lesser number of seats.

However, the BJP-Shiv Sena coalition is on course to retain power albeit with a reduced majority in Maharashtra where the opposition Congress-NCP alliance put up a good show while BJP-ruled Haryana appeared headed for a hung assembly and JJP chief Dushyant Chautala set to become the kingmaker.

In the first Assembly elections after the BJP's triumph in the Lok Sabha polls in May, the saffron party's electoral juggernaut met with some resistance in Maharashtra and Haryana with a resurgent Congress performing creditably in the northern state. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was set to emerge as the single largest party in Haryana followed by the Congress.