Ajit Pawar wins in Baramati with more than 1.5 lakh margin

• Ajit Pawar, nephew of Sharad Pawar, is contesting the Maharashtra Assembly election from Baramati constituency.
• According to the Election Commission, Pawar is set to win by a margin of over 1 lakh votes.
• Pawar announced he was resigned from politics after being accused of a ₹25,000 crore scam.
• Within a day, Pawar announced that he's going to continue to contest the state election.

Ajit Pawar, nephew of Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) patriarch Sharad Pawar, resigned as a Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) and quit politics altogether on September 27 — yet, his name was still on the ballots in Maharashtra on October 21.

And, now he's won the in Baramati constituency with a large margin of 1.5 lakh. Pawar was able to garner 83.24% of vote share which he got nearly 2 lakh votes to his name.

In comparison, the BJP candidate Gopichand Kundlik Padalkar trailed behind with 30,282 votes, which is only 12.92% of the vote share.

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Fighting the election from Baramati constituency, he’ll be going up against 10 other candidates, including Gopichand Kundlik Padalkar from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The high-profile leader of the NCP, known fondly as Ajit Dada, hasn’t had an easy run. Amid campaigning for the election, he was accused of money laundering by the Enforcement Directorate - a ₹25,000 crore scam to do with the Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank (MSCB).

He’s made headlines for all the wrong reasons but he has still not be written off by the political watchers in the state.

Also read: Maharashtra Assembly Election 2019 results, BJP-Sena combine leads in over 163 seats and Congress-NCP in 93

After Pawar’s unexpected resignation, he held a press conference within a day to apologise and announce that he will continue to contest the election. "I put in my papers before the speaker's personal assistant at the state assembly yesterday because I felt responsible for Sharad Pawar's name turning up in the matter. I apologise for taking such a decision without telling anybody,"

Making the fight tougher for Ajit Pawar, party chief Sharad Pawar and Baramati MP Supriya Sule didn’t hold any rallies for Pawar — instead it was his wife, son and other leaders campaigned for him.

Pawar’s past

The current MSCB scam is the second money laundering allegation leveled against Pawar. Back in 2012, Pawar resigned as the Water Resources Minister after allegations of ₹20,000 irrigation scam.

He made a comeback mere months later, when he was sworn in as the deputy CM after getting a clean chit from the government.

Baramati, home field of the Pawars, is pegged as a homage to the ‘Sharad Pawar Model of Development’ by the NCP. What was once a primarily agrarian constituency is now filled with automobile units, distilleries, textile and sugar mills, according to the party.

After the Assembly election in 2009, Pawar asserted that he would become the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra but lost out to Chhagan Bhujbal.

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