MUMBAI: With hardly a few hours left for counting, excitement coupled with anxiety is dogging political parties and candidates who fought pitched battles in the three-phased elections to 48 seats in Maharashtra.
This election is crucial for NCP strongman Sharad Pawar who is making a bid for prime ministership in his own way even while giving signals that he is very much part of the UPA operation to get the numbers to run the next government.
If the NCP makes impressive gains in Maharashtra, where it is contesting 22 seats, and if the Congress fails to become the single largest party when the results are out, ambitious Pawar will try to make it to the prime minister’s post with the support of Third Front players like Prakash Karat, Chandrababu Naidu and Naveen Patnaik.
Pawar (Madha), his daughter Supriya Sule (Baramati) and Union Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel (Bhandara-Gondiya) are the NCP heavy weights fighting polls in Maharashtra.
The results are also crucial for the Shiv Sena as it is the first election after Raj Thackeray left the party and formed the Maharashtra Navanirman Sena (MNS). Political pundits are eager to see Sena’s performance in Mumbai, where the MNS put up strong candidates and seriously fought the polls.
For the Congress and the BJP, any kind of electoral setback in the state this time for the respective parties, would be disastrous as factionalism would raise its ugly head again. In the Congress, the supporters of Chief Minister Ashok Chavan and former Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh have been at loggerheads for quite some time.
The fight in the BJP between state chief Nitin Gadkari and former Deputy Chief Minister and BJP national general secretary Gopinath Munde before the polls, was settled temporarily at the behest of the central leadership.
Munde, brother-in-law of the late Pramod Mahajan and a candidate from Beed constituency, is peeved that his supporters are getting a raw deal.
What made him the most angry was the denial of a party ticket to Poonam Mahajan, daughter of Pramod Mahajan.
The hopes of the Congress-NCP are pinned on the revival of their political fortunes in Vidarbha region where the combine won only one out of 10 seats last time. The BJP-Shiv Sena calculation is that they would perform well in all the regions on the basis of the hope that an anti-incumbency wave against the present Congress-NCP dispensation will sweep across the state.