As the countdown to November 20 grows louder, all eyes are on Raigad district in the Konkan, which has become a classic microcosm of Maharashtra’s shifting political alignments in wake of the splits within the Shiv Sena in 2022 and the NCP in July 2023.
In the Assembly segments of Shrivardhan and Mahad, the prestige of tall regional leaders is on the line. At the heart of the Shrivardhan contest is Aditi Tatkare, the incumbent MLA from the ruling Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and daughter of Raigad MP Sunil Tatkare.
The Minister for Women and Child Development in the ruling Mahayuti, she successfully held the constituency – a Tatkare family borough – in the 2019 Assembly polls, overcoming fierce competition and the historical dominance of the then undivided Shiv Sena in the area.
The darkest cloud on Aditi’s horizon has been Bharat Gogawale, the vocal whip of CM Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena who, hitherto, had been the fiercest opponent of taking the Ajit Pawar-led NCP into the Mahayuti’s bandwagon. Gogawale had vociferously opposed Aditi’s appointment as Raigad’s Guardian Minister last year. The edge to Gogawale’s anger was made keener when he did not get a ministerial berth in the Mahayuti cabinet expansion – all the more reason for him to channelize his spleen on Aditi Tatkare.
Yet, after more than a year, tempers appear to have cooled for the sake of strategic objectives. Aditi has said that Gogawale and the Shinde Sena did aid in her father’s victory in the Lok Sabha election.
Gogawale, himself no mean satrap, is seeking re-election for the fourth consecutive time from the neighbouring Assembly segment of Mahad. ‘Bharat sheth’ – as he is popularly known – claims that the Mahayuti will claim all Assembly seats in Raigad, implying that the schism between himself and the Tatkares are bygone.
CM Shinde’s pacification of his party colleague came in form of Gogawale’s appointment as Chairman of the Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation (MSRTC), with a bid to kill two birds with one stone: give his Shiv Sena greater leverage in local constituencies, especially in the coastal Konkan region and make sure allies within the Mahayuti, that is his party and the NCP work as smoothly as possible.
All that said, the key question remains whether the Tatkare family’s political legacy can endure the test of factionalism and changing alliances and whether the Sena and the NCP have campaigned as wholeheartedly for each other as they claim.
Meanwhile, Guhagar Assembly segment in Konkan’s Ratnagiri is shaping up to be a humdinger: Uddhav Thackeray’s point man, the mercurial Bhaskar Jadhav, who is seeking a fourth term as the MVA’s (SS-UBT) candidate, is up against a determined coalition of ruling BJP-Shiv Sena forces who have propped Rajesh Bendal, a former municipal council president of Guhagar.
Shinde’s Shiv Sena, which zeroed on Bendal, himself from the Ajit Pawar-led NCP, has solicited the aid of former BJP MLA Vinay Natu who was an eager aspirant for the Mahayuti ticket for the Guhagar seat. However, the nomination ultimately went to Bendal, with the approval of Natu, though. The Mahayuti this time is hell-bent on supplanting Jadhav. November 23 will tell whether their efforts succeed.
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