Former Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has avenged his insult. He defeated the joint effort of Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray and NCP supremo Sharad Pawar to win the third BJP candidate in the Rajya Sabha elections. Earlier, because of Uddhav and Pawar, Fadnavis had to resign within four days of taking oath as the chief minister. Since then he was looking for the spot. This time when the BJP fielded a third candidate at the behest of Fadnavis, it seemed that this time also he would not work in front of Uddhav and Pawar. After all, Sharad Pawar himself spoke to the leaders of the Samajwadi Party and took two of their votes with him and two votes of Owaisi’s party were also done in support of the Congress. Yet another Shiv Sena candidate Sanjay Pawar lost the election.
The five Rajya Sabha seats in Maharashtra have been decided by the first preference vote. Two candidates from BJP and one each from Shiv Sena, NCP and Congress won. The real fight was for the sixth seat, where Shiv Sena’s Sanjay Pawar was pitted against BJP’s Dhananjay Mahadik. Fadnavis ensured that it was not decided by first preference vote. They knew they would win the second preference votes. For this, he got the nine MLAs of small parties supporting the government cross-voting. The main opposition BJP has 106 MLAs of its own and is supported by seven other MLAs. He got the support of one MLA from Raj Thackeray’s party and won the support of nine other MLAs. Fadnavis was so confident of winning the third seat that he first allotted 48 votes each to both the candidates Piyush Goyal and Anil Bonde, while 41 votes were needed to win one seat. His third candidate got 27 first preference votes and second preference votes got more than 41 and a half.
