Kamthi Election Result: BJP State Unit Chief Chandrashekhar Bawankule Wins
BJP State unit president Chandrashekhar Bawankule secured victory in the Kamthi assembly constituency. He defeated Suresh Bhoyar of the Congress by a margin of 40,946 votes.
Bawankule’s appointment as party chief in 2022, is considered as a party’s strategic decision to expand and strengthen the party’s base among OBCs in Maharashtra. He belongs to the Teli community. Telis constitute considerable portion of Vidarbha population.
Bawankule comes from a farming family. A small-time contractor, he entered into politics in early 1990s, launching an outfit called the Chhatrapati Sena with an aim to “fight for the social rights of the common people”. He had joined the BJP by 1994-95, and soon came to known as close to Nitin Gadkari. Bawankule was later made the vice-president of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, a youth wing of the BJP.
Bawankule got elected as a District Council Member in 1997 and 2002. In 2004, his debut Assembly polls from Maharashtra, he won from Kamthi constituency. He defeated Republican Party of India (RPI)’s Bawankule by a margin of 7,394 votes. In 2009 and 2014, Bawankule retained the seat in Kamthi. He then served as the Energy Minister in the BJP-Shinde coalition government led by Devendra Fadnavis.
Bhoyar is a former president of the Nagpur Zila Panchayat. In the 2019 Assembly elections, he contested from the Kamthi seat for the first time but lost. BJP candidate Tekchand Sawarkar won from the seat, securing 1,18,182 votes, while Bhoyar retreated to the second position, garnering 1,07,066 votes.
However, in the 2019 election, the BJP denied Bawankule the poll ticket, citing that central leadership is unhappy over corruption charges during his tenure as minister. After that, he kept a low profile. But dip in party’s vote share from Vidarbha region in 2019 in comparison to 2014 was partly attributed to keeping Bawankule aside from electoral fray.
Thus, soon after the polls, Bawankule was reinstated as party general secretary and in the December 2021 Legislative Council elections, he won from Nagpur.
Since the debut Assembly elections in 1962, Kamthi was considered as a Congress stronghold for a long time. In 1995, independent candidate Deorao Radke won the seat, breaking the grand old party’s dominion on the sat. In 1999, the Republican Party of India’s Sulekha Kumbhare emerged as the winner. In 2004, the BJP secured victory in the constituency for the first time and has been retaining the seat till now.
