Mumbai, November 25 (IANS). Nana Patole has resigned from the post of Maharashtra Congress President after the defeat of Mahavikas Aghadi in Maharashtra Assembly elections.
According to sources, the party high command has not yet accepted his resignation. Patole’s resignation has come at a time when the Congress Party has given its worst ever performance in the Maharashtra Assembly elections.
In Maharashtra, the ruling NDA has given a crushing defeat to the Congress Party and Mahavikas Aghadi in the elections. The Congress party had contested elections on 103 seats in the state, but it got only 16 seats.
Party candidate Nana Patole won from Sakoli seat with the smallest margin of 208 votes. His victory in Sakoli ranks among the top three among seats won by smallest margins this year. These results are in stark contrast to the 2019 assembly elections, when Nana Patole had won Sakoli by a huge margin of about 8,000 votes.
Big leaders of Congress have lost in this year’s assembly elections. Veteran leaders like Balasaheb Thorat, Prithviraj Chavan, Vijay Wadettiwar, Yashomati Thakur, Manikrao Thackeray have faced defeat.
Patole, who will take over as Maharashtra Congress President in 2021, has been vocal about his leadership. Two days before the election results were declared, Patole had courted controversy by claiming that Congress would lead the next Mahavikas Aghadi government. Under his leadership, the Congress Party performed brilliantly in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and won 13 seats. But after poor performance in the assembly elections, he has offered to resign before the Congress high command.
While BJP won 132 seats in the grand alliance, Shiv Sena, which is contesting the first assembly elections under the leadership of Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, won 55 seats and Ajit Pawar’s NCP won 41 seats.
–IANS
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