Maharashtra polls: Senior BJP corporator resigns over party’s Chinchwad candidate

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) continues to face internal discord over the Chinchwad assembly elections with senior party corporator, Chandrakant Nakate, being the latest to tender his resignation over the candidature of Shankar Jagtap for the upcoming polls. Nakate – a three-term BJP corporator who won the municipal elections from Rahatni – resigned from the party on Thursday.

Nakate said that despite significant dissatisfaction with the Jagtap family among voters in the Chinchwad assembly constituency, the BJP still nominated Shankar Jagtap. “I have genuinely worked to promote the party’s ideology at the grassroots’ level. I played a crucial role in ensuring a majority for the late MLA Laxman Jagtap in the 2014 and 2019 elections. However, the Jagtap family did not allow us to hold even a single position during the five-year term,” Nakate said.

“Despite being a corporator for 15 years, I was overlooked for prestigious roles such as mayor, standing committee chairman and party leader, with opportunities being given to new corporators instead. Despite my loyalty to the party, I was treated unfairly,” he said.

However, Nakate’s resignation is only the latest in a series of challenges the Mahayuti alliance has had to face in the Chinchwad constituency. Even before the candidate was declared by the alliance, the Chinchwad constituency had a large number of aspirants for the assembly polls. The alliance declared the BJP’s Pimpri-Chinchwad unit president, Shankar Jagtap, who is the brother-in-law of sitting MLA Ashwini Jagtap, as the official candidate only after BJP state unit chief Chandrashekhar Bawankule held a meeting with Ashwini Jagtap and convinced her to make way for Shankar Jagtap. Later, the party had to quell a rebellion by a group of former BJP corporators to clear the decks for Shankar Jagtap while declaring Shatrughan Kate as the BJP Pimpri-Chinchwad unit president. Subsequently, the Mahayuti alliance had to deal with two more rebel candidates from the Nationalist Congress Party/NCP (Ajit Pawar) – Vittal alias Nana Kate and Bhausaheb Bhoir – who filed their nominations as independent candidates. While deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar managed to convince Kate to withdraw his candidature, Bhoir remained firm about contesting as an independent rebel candidate. Meanwhile, the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) alliance nominated former corporator Rahul Kalate of the NCP (SP) as its Chinchwad candidate.