Maharashtra Election Results 2024: Winners With Lowest Victory Margins—Nana Patole To Rohit Pawar

The results of the Maharashtra assembly elections, declared on Saturday, showed there were few seats where the winning candidates sailed across by narrow margins. These include heavyweights like Congress' state unit chief Nana Patole, former minister Dilip Walse Patil, and Pawar family scion Rohit Pawar.

The outcome of the state assembly polls was unprecedented, with the Mahayuti comprising the Bharatiya Janata Party, Eknath Shinde's Shiv Sena, and Ajit Pawar's Nationalist Congress Party cumulatively winning 235 out of the 288 seats contested. The Opposition bloc of Maha Vikas Aghadi, which includes Congress, Sharad Pawar-led NCP and Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena, was reduced to only 49 constituencies.

Seat-wise, there were victories with margins as high as 1,45,944 votes, whereas the lowest win margin came down to just 162 votes.

Here are 10 candidates who won with a slim margin:

• Nana Patole: The Maharashtra Congress president, who was expected to swing the polls in Vidarbha region in the party's favour, barely managed to hold on to his seat Sakoli. He won by only 208 votes against BJP's Avinash Anandrao Brahmankar.

• Rohit Pawar: The grandnephew of NCP (SP) chief Sharad Pawar, who was seen as a key factor behind the senior Pawar-led faction's success in the Lok Sabha polls, struggled to retain his seat of Karjat-Jamkhed. In the end, he won by 1,243 votes against BJP's Ram Shankar Shinde.

• Mufti Mohammad Khalique: The All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen leader, who was the sitting MLA of Malegaon Central, faced a neck-to-neck battle against Asif Shaikh Rasheed, who floated a party named Indian Secular Largest Assembly of Maharashtra ahead of the polls. Khalique managed to retain the seat by 162 votes—the lowest margin in this polls.

• Manda Mhatre: The two-time MLA of Belapur—the constituency that entails most of the satellite city of Navi Mumbai—faced her most stringent contest so far against NCP (SP)'s Sandeep Naik. The electoral battle, that boiled down to the last round of counting, was eventually won by Mhatre by just 377 votes.

• Dilip Walse Patil: A minister in the outgoing government, Dilip Walse Patil of NCP (Ajit Pawar) managed to win from the Ambegaon assembly seat with by a slim margin of 1,523 votes. He was challenged by Devdatta Nikam of the Sharad Pawar faction.

• Mahesh Sawant: The Shiv Sena (UBT) leader won by 1,316 votes from Mahim, the high-profile seat that witnessed the poll debut of Amit Thackeray, the son of Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray. The first runner-up from the seat was sitting MLA and Shinde camp leader Sada Sarvankar.

• Anant Nar: The Shiv Sena (UBT) candidate won from Mumbai's Jogeshwari East constituency against rival Manisha Ravindra Waikar of the Eknath Shinde-led faction by a margin of 1,541 votes.

• Sajid Khan Pathan: The Congress leader scraped through in the Akola West constituency by a narrow of margin of 1,283 votes. The runner-up was BJP candidate Vijay Agrawal.

• Gaikwad Sanjay Rambhau: The Shinde-led Sena leader won the constituency of Buldhana by a wafer-thin margin of 841 votes, as he defeated rival Thackeray camp's Jayshree Sunil Shelke.

• Shirishkumar Naik: The Congress leader won the Nawapur assembly segment by only 1,121 votes against Independent candidate Sharad Krishnarao Gavit.