Maharashtra: Sharad Pawar’s NCP wins Beed, the last Lok Sabha seat to be declared, by narrow margin

In the wee hours of Wednesday, Maharashtra’s Beed was the last of 543 Lok Sabha seats to be declared in the 2024 general election.

After prolonged drama and tension, Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar)’s Bajrang Sonawane won the seat by a narrow margin of 6,553 votes, defeating Bharatiya Janata Party’s Pankaja Munde.

Sonawane had been trailing for the most of the day as votes were counted. It was only late at night that he rallied to victory.

“Till night, BJP workers kept demanding recounting and delayed the results,” said Muktaram Gawli, a Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) worker.

The party’s win in Beed is crucial as it cements the Marathwada region’s shifting political allegiance, from the BJP-Shiv Sena to the Maha Vikas Aghadi.

The Bharatiya Janata Party has won from Beed in every general election since 1996 except in 2004, when the undivided Nationalist Congress Party took the seat. Since 2009, the Munde family has won from Beed thrice, with Gopinath Munde securing two terms and his daughter Pritam Munde one term in office. This time, his second daughter, former MLA Pankaja Munde, contested from the seat.

Sonawane had kicked off a political storm after he complained to the Election Commission of alleged booth capturing and voter suppression in 38 villages of Beed on May 13, the day of polling in the constituency.

The district election officer, when asked by the poll panel to submit a report, said that a repoll was not necessary.

In numbers

Sonawane polled 6.83 lakh votes against Pankaja Munde’s 6.77 lakh votes, the lowest winning margin of any Lok Sabha seat in Marathwada.

In other seats from the region – Nanded, Latur, Parbhani, Osmanabad, Jalna and Hingoli – the winning margin of Maha Vikas Aghadi candidates ranged between 50,000 to 3.5 lakh votes. Three seats each were won by the Congress and the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray).

Aurangabad is the only seat in Marathwada that the Maha Yuti alliance – comprising the BJP, the Eknath Shinde-led faction of the Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar-led faction of the Nationalist Congress Party – managed to secure. The Shinde Sena’s candidate Sandipanrao Bhamare won by a margin of 1.34 lakh votes.

An aide of Sonawane told Scroll that they were expecting a wider margin of victory in Beed. “But our complaints of booth capturing were not heeded by the Election Commission,” the aide said.

The margins by which the Maha Vikas Aghadi won in Marathwada suggest a consolidation of Muslim and Maratha votes in the region, which has been at the forefront of the Maratha community’s demand for reservations in government jobs and education.

The community has demanded Kunbi caste certificates and reservations under quota meant for the Other Backward Classes.

Earlier this year, thousands of Marathas had travelled across the state to Navi Mumbai under the leadership of activist Manojt Jarange-Patil to voice their demands.

Chief Minister Eknath Shinde eventually announced a separate reservation of 10% for Marathas in government jobs and education, outside of the Other Backward Class quota. He also said that Kunbi caste certificates would be provided to blood relatives of Kunbis.

The move was rejected by the Marathas because a similar mode of reservations for the community had been struck down by the Supreme Court.

The Marathas have expressed discontent with the BJP for wanting to secure its Other Backward Class vote bank at the cost of their reservation demand. This likely led to a one-sided win of the Opposition alliance in Marathwada.

The resenment rendered Munde, who is herself an Other Backward Class candidate, at a disadvantage throughout her poll campaign. She avoided invoking the Ram temple in Ayodhya in a bid to avoid upsetting Muslim voters.

Booth capturing, voter suppression

On May 13, widespread complaints of booth capturing were reported by members of the Sharad Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party, polling agents and voters.

Sonawane claimed that booths in 33 villages in the Parli Assembly segment, three villages in Kaij Assembly segment and two in the Majalgaon Assembly segment had been captured. He alleged that many voters were turned away and not allowed to cast their vote entirely, or that their fingers were inked without allowing them to cast their vote.

“Not just Muslim or Dalit voters, we received this complaint from Maratha and OBC voters too,” Sonawane had told Scroll. If true, this may have reduced his margin of victory.

The Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) contested 10 seats in Maharashtra and won eight of them. The BJP won only nine of the 28 seats it contested, reducing it from the state’s single largest party in the 2019 general election to one of the poorest performers this year, after Ajit Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party and Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi.