Maharashtra Civic Body Polls: BJP, Other Parties Claim Big Victories

 The ruling BJP and other parties on Tuesday separately claimed to have won maximum Gram Panchayats in Maharashtra in the maiden local body polls conducted after the alliance government led by Eknath Shinde came to power in June this year.

Similar claims of victory were made by the faction led by Chief Minister Shinde, Sharad Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party, the Congress, and the Uddhav Thackeray faction, even though the elections were not contested as per party affiliations.

Voting for 7,682 Gram Panchayats was held on December 18. The results were declared on Tuesday. The Bharatiya Janata Party stated the candidates backed by the party have won 2,482 seats, while the Shinde faction claimed victory in 842 seats.

The NCP claimed to have won 1,215 seats while the Congress said the highest number of more than 900 sarpanchs were elected from that party alone. The Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) faction said it bagged 639 seats.

Maharashtra State Election Commission (MSEC), however, said as the elections were contested by panels (comprising groups of candidates irrespective of political affiliations), the commission does not provide data suggesting the number of villages or seats won by any particular party.

"Voting took place for 7,682 Gram Panchayats which were supposed to elect 65,996 members. 14,028 members got elected unopposed for various local reasons.

"Out of 7,619 villages in the state, the election of Sarpanchs (village head) was unopposed in 699 villages. However, no application was filed for the post of Sarpanch in 63 Gram Panchayats," the MSEC said in a statement.

After the results were declared, incidents of clashes were reported from Aurangabad and other parts of the state.

In Jalgaon district in north Maharashtra, the brother of a winning candidate in Jamner taluka died of a cardiac arrest amid stone pelting between two local factions of BJP, police said.

"One Dhanraj Mali, the brother of the winning candidate in Takli Kurd village, was present when stone pelting started. He felt unconscious and died due to cardiac arrest. There were no injury marks on his body," said M Rajkumar, Superintendent of Police, Jalgaon district.

Earlier in the day, Maharashtra BJP president Chandrashekhar Bawankule had termed the poll outcome a "historic" win for the party, which he said showed that rural Maharashtra trusted the Shinde-Devendra Fadnavis government.

"The entire state is getting saffronised. It is a historic win for the BJP," he told reporters in Nagpur.

State Congress chief Nana Patole, however, accused the BJP of indulging in false propaganda about the election results.

"The highest number of more than 900 sarpanchs were elected from the Congress alone and the number of sarpanch seats won by the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) is far more than the BJP," he said.

Leader of Opposition in the Legislative Council and Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Ambadas Danve said a large number of sarpanchs from his faction were being elected.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)