Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has resolved not to campaign in the upcoming local body election of rural bodies due to the death of Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar. The ruling indicates the gesture of the state leadership to exercise restraint and respect in the period of official mourning.
Reports have it that Fadnavis accepted the call on Saturday, three days after Ajit Pawar allegedly died in a plane crash in Baramati. Subsequently, the Chief Minister directed the local heads of the Party and office holders to assume the responsibility of election campaigning in the polls that are to be held on February 7.
There will be 12 Zilla Parishads and 125 Panchayat Samitis in Maharashtra. The polling date was changed following a mourning period of three days by the government following the death of Ajit Pawar. The campaign is also scheduled to end on February 5, and the vote counting will be done on February 9.
But previously, CM Fadnavis was to make almost 22 election stops in a seven-day campaign activity. But all those engagements are now discarded. According to party sources, the leadership was not even in favour of doing high-profile campaigning at a time of bereavement.
The death of Ajit Pawar has also left a big vacuum in the Nationalist Congress Party campaign. The elections of the Pune Zilla Parishad will be the first in almost thirty years that he will not take part in. Pawar was both a power-broking figure in the district politics and a major power broker in the local body elections.
The biggest political event on the scene was the swearing-in of Sunetra Pawar, the wife of Ajit Pawar, as the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra on Saturday, becoming the first woman to be given that position. In between, the election in Pune Zilla Parishad is likely to be a competitive fight between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the NCP.
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