In a jolt to the ruling BJP,  its sitting MP from Jalgaon  Unmesh Patil — who has been denied a party ticket to re-contest the Lok Sabha polls —  on Tuesday reached out to the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena, in an apparent effort to seek its nomination to contest the polls from the same constituency in north Maharashtra.

Patil met Shiv Sena spokesperson Sanjay Raut in Mumbai. Though Patil claimed that his meeting with Raut was personal in nature, informed sources in the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) said that at the meeting Patil conveyed his readiness to contest the Lok Sabha polls from Jalgaon on a Sena (UBT) ticket.

Sources said that Patil would soon be meeting Sena president Uddhav Thackeray to make a bid to formalise the arrangement.

When asked about the development, Raut said: “…you will get the news of Unmesh Patil very soon”. 

Under the seat-sharing arrangement reached among the three constituents of the MVA constituents, the Shiv Sena (UBT) will field its candidate from Jalgaon Lok constituency which is going to polls in the fourth phase on May 7. 

Worried over the possibility of his party’s sitting MP Unmesh Patil contesting the LS polls on the Sena (UBT) ticket, State BJP President Chandrashekhar Bawankule has reached out to Patil. It remains to be seen if the BJP will be able to placate him and restrain him from moving over to the Sena (UBT) to contest the May 7 polls.     

Jalgaon has been a BJP stronghold for more than two and a half decades. The BJP has been winning this Lok Sabha seat since 1999 Gunwantrao Sarode represented Jalgaon from 1991 to 1996.. Y G Mahajan won this seat in the 1999 and 2004 polls. A T Patil bagged this seat in 2009 and 2014 polls.

In 2019, Unmesh Patil won the Jalgaon seat by defeating Gulabrao Deokar of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) with a huge margin of 4 lakh votes.

While Patil polled 7.13 lakh votes, Deokar of the NCP came a distant second by securing 3.02 lakh votes.

In 2014, Unmesh Patil had been elected as an MLA from the Chalisgaon constituency in Maharashtra. He was also the chairman of the Maharashtra State Cooperative Sugar Factories Federation Limited from 2015 to 2019.

Smita Wagh, who has replaced Unmesh Patil as the BJP candidate from Jalgaon, was the president of the BJP’s women’s wing before she became an MLC. In the last Lok Sabha polls, too, she was one of the aspirants to contest the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Hosever, the BJP had given the ticket to Unmesh Patil.