Mumbai: The signs are ominous for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its Minister for Women and Child Development, Pankaja Munde as far as retaining the 15 assembly seat’s that it had won in the 2014 assembly elections out of the 46 seats in the Marathwada region. Her arch rival and estranged cousin brother, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) candidate Dhananjay Munde has begun splitting dedicated Dhangar and Vanjari community cadres of the BJP in Beed district. Not only that he has also begun weaning cadres from the Shiv Sena as well, thereby depleting, eroding the support base of the BJP and Munde sister’s.
Local sources in the BJP while speaking to News21 on conditions of anonymity disclosed that it will be an herculean task for Pankaja Munde to retain at least the Beed bastion of her father late Gopinath Munde. Despite ruffling a few feathers in the party by raking up the controversial claim to the Chief Ministers post, Munde once again on Saturday remarked that it was not she who has raised the topic, but she cannot do much if the supporters rake it up.
Her remarks came after a section of the crowd at party president Amit Shah’s rally at Bhagwangadh on October 8 raised slogans demanding that Pankaja Munde be declared as the next and first woman chief minister of Maharashtra.
Sources disclosed that with the party leadership firmly backing Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, the ideal thing for Pankaja Munde would be to lay low build a strong support base through hard-work and shed their aura of inaccessibility which is causing cadres to break away from her. Ideally she should have been working hard so as to create pressure on the leadership that there is no other alternative other than her. Right now her actions are foolhardy and self-defeating, he added.
To make matters worse the public response to NCP chief Sharad Pawar’s election rallies is a warning sign for the Munde sister’s. But for the BJP the situation is akin to the saying “who will bell the cat!”
Out of the 15 seat’s that the BJP had won in Marathwada in 2014, the party stands to lose 10 of them. Most significantly out of those 10, Parli assembly seat held by Pankaja Munde itself is witnessing a tough fight. Moreover, out of the 10 assembly seats that the BJP can lose, three of them are in Beed district – Ashti, Kaij (SC) and Parli. Besides these elsewhere in Marathwada region the party could lose – Partur, Badnapur, Bhokardhan, Phulambri, Aurangabad East, Gangapur and Udgir (SC).
