Maharashtra’s former Chief Minister and the BJP nominee Ashok Chavan, NCP (Ajit Pawar faction) sitting MP Praful Patel and Congress nominee Chandrakant Handore are among the six candidates in the fray for the biennial Rajya Sabha polls in the State who will get elected unopposed.
With the ruling BJP deciding not to field its fourth candidate for the February 27 RS polls, decks were cleared for the uncontested election of all the six candidates in the fray.
The BJP has nominated Chavan, who quit the Congress and joined its ranks on Tuesday, former MLA from Pune Medha Kulkarni and RSS pracharak-turned-BJP leader Dr Ajeet Gopchade as its candidates for the RS polls.
The NCP (Ajit Pawar) sprang a surprise by nominating its senior leader Praful Patel, who is a four-time Lok Sabha member and three times Rajya Sabha member.
Sixty-six-year-old Patel, who was elected to Rajya Sabha in July 2022 and whose term will end in 2028, has been nominated by the NCP (Ajit Pawar) mid way through his tenure for some technical reasons. "After considering various issues and also technical issues (arising out of the recent split in the Sharad Pawar-led NCP), we have decided to field Praful Patel as our candidate,” State NCP President Sunil Tatkare said.
Informed sources in the NCP (Ajit Pawar) said that Patel would resign from current RS membership after he gets re-elected to the Upper House of Parliament for the fourth time.
On its part, the Congress has fielded a Dalit face and its state Working President Chandrakant D Handore as its candidate for the Rs polls. The move to nominate Handore nearly 20 months after he suffered a shocking defeat in the June 2022 biennial Maharashtra Legislative Council elections because of cross-voting despite his being the Congress’ first-choice candidates.
Sixty-seven-year-old Handore was a Municipal Corporator in Mumbai, later a Mayor of Mumbai, a two-time MLA and state minister for several years.
The Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena is likely to nominate Milind Deora, a two-time former Lok Sabha MP from Mumbai South and son of Gandhi-family loyalist Murli Deora, as its candidate for the polls. The RS polls are being held to fill the vacancies to be created by the expiry of the terms of Narayan Rane, Prakash Javadekar and V Muraleedharan (all three from BJP), Kumar Ketkar (Congress), Anil Desai (Shiv Sena) and Vandana Chavan (NCP), who are retiring in April
