Maharashtra LoP Vijay Wadettiwar To Retain Brahmapuri Seat (image:x.com/VijayWadettiwar)
Chandrapur, Maharashtra: Senior Congress leader and Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly Vijay Wadettiwar has been fielded from Brahmapuri assembly segment in Maharashtra. He is seeking his third term from the constituency.
In the 2014 Assembly polls, Wadettiwar won the seat by defeating BJP candidate Atul Devidas Deshkar by a margin of 13,610 votes. In 2019, Wadettiwar garnered 96,726 votes and defeated Shiv Sena candidate Sandip Wamanrao Gaddamwar by 18,549 votes. Prior to this, he was a two-term MLA from the Chimur Assembly constituency.
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Wadettiwar started his political career as a grass-roots worker with the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), the student wing of the Congress. In the nineties, he joined the Shiv Sena, and during the Sena-BJP government, he was made the chairman of the Maharashtra Forest Development Corporation. Then, he became a member of the Maharashtra legislative council (MLC) from Gadchiroli-Wardha-Chandrapur in 1998.
His debut election in 2004 from Chimur was on the Shiv Sena ticket. In 2005, he rebelled against Sena leadership and quit Shiv Sena, along with former chief minister Narayan Rane, and joined Congress. In the 2009 elections, he contested again from Chimur on a Congress ticket and won. Subsequently, he was made the Cabinet Minister. Though Congress lost power in 2014, Wadettiwar was made deputy leader in the legislative assembly. In 2019, he was first made Leader of Opposition for four months as former Congress leader, and the then Leader of Opposition, Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil, left the party to join the BJP ahead of Lok Sabha elections. He was appointed as the Opposition Leader for the second time in 2023.
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Bramhapuri constituency is located in the Chandrapur district of the Vidarbha region. In the Assembly elections, he is pitted against the BJP’s Krishnalal Bajirao Sahare.
The 288 Assembly seats in Maharashtra will go to polls on November 20 and counting of votes will take place on November 23. The ruling Mahayuti alliance consists of the BJP, the Chief Minister Eknath Shinde-led breakaway faction of the Shiv Sena, and the deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar’s faction of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). The opposition alliance comprise the INDIA bloc’s MVA or the Maha Vikas Aghadi, which has the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), or SS (UBT) led by former CM Uddhav Thackeray, the NCP (SP) faction led by Sharad Pawar and the Congress.
