As expected, Dhananjay Munde on Monday won the byelection for the Legislative Council seat as a candidate of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). However, some of the NCP’s own legislators seemed to have voted against their party’s candidate as Mr Dhananjay Munde got 17 less votes than expected.
The byelection was held as Mr Dhanajay Munde quit BJP, resigned from the post of member of state council, and joined the NCP, owing to some differences with his uncle Gopinath Munde. The NCP candidate was seen fighting the bypoll against independent candidate Prithviraj Kakade who was supported by the BJP.
It was, however, clear that Mr Dhananjay Munde was to emerge as the winner as the Congress-NCP alliance had a total of 144 votes in their favour, of which the Congress had 92 votes, while the NCP had 62 votes. Meanwhile, the Shiv Sena had only 45 votes, and the BJP got 47 votes. The Congress-NCP had managed to convince some Sena-BJP legislators to vote for Mr Dhananjay Munde, and therefore, he was expected to get 182 votes against Mr Kakade’s 91 votes. However, he got only 165 votes, while Mr Kakade managed to get 106 votes.
Shiv Sena MLA Suresh Jain was unable to vote as he had been hospitalised. Amit Deshmukh of the Congress and Dhairyashil Patil of the Peasant’s Party were absent for personal reasons, while two votes were declared invalid.
State BJP president Devendra Fadnavis claimed that the two invalid votes were cast in Mr Kakade’s favour. “The result is a tight slap on DCM Ajit Pawar’s face. Though their candidate was sure to win, he was talking about the fragmentation within the BJP. On the contrary, it seems that the NCP MLAs have rejected Mr Pawar’s politics and voted against their party’s candidate,” said Mr Fadnavis.
According to sources, some of the OBC legislators from the NCP, who respect OBC leader Mr Gopinath Munde, voted in favour of Mr Kakade.