Nagpur South West Election Result: Devendra Fadnavis Secures Sixth Consecutive Win

Deputy Chief Minister and BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis secured his sixth win from Nagpur South West constituency. He defeated  Prafulla Gudadhe Patil of the Congress with a margin of 39,710 votes. In the 2014 election, Prafulla contested against Fadnavis for the first time and lost the seat to Fadnavis by a margin of 58,942 votes.

A stronghold for the BJP, Fadnavis has been maintaining victory in the Nagpur South West over multiple assembly elections. In the 2019 elections, Fadnavis secured 1,09,237 votes. He has defeated Congress candidate Dr Ashish Deshmukh by a margin of 49,344 votes. In 2014, Fadnavis defeated Congress rival Prafulla Vinod Gudadhe by a margin of 58,942 votes.

Fadnavis began his political career with Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological fountainhead of the BJP. During his college days, he was an active member of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP). He became the the youngest Municipal Councilor of Nagpur Municipal Corporation at the age of 21 and got re-elected as mayor.

Some of the key positions he held in the party and government include National Vice President of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), General Secretary of the BJP Maharashtra, President of the BJP Maharashtra, Leader of the Opposition in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly, and Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra.

Prafulla Gudadhe Patil is an ex-corporator from Nagpur Municipal Corporation. He is the son of former minister Vinod Gudadhe-Patil, who was the first BJP MLA from Nagpur district in 1990. A two-time MLA from Nagpur-West, the senior Patil later left the BJP and joined Congress. Though Vinod contested in the 1999 Assembly election on Congress ticket, he lost to Fadnavis, who was then making his debut in the state polls.

The 288 assembly seats in the State went to polls in a single phase on November 20 and 66.05% voter turnout was recorded. Among the seats, 234 belongs to general constituencies, 29 are reserved for Scheduled Castes (SC), and 25 are reserved for Scheduled Tribes (ST).

The ruling Mahayuti 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, the INDIA bloc’s MVA or the Maha Vikas Aghadi, 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.

This assembly polls mark first one in the state after Shiv Sena and NCP split.