Ajit Pawar Wins Baramati After High Stakes Familial Battle

Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister and NCP leader Ajit Pawar won the Baramati seat with 1,81,132 votes, defeating Yugendra Pawar from the NCP (Sharad Pawar faction) in the high stakes battle.

Yugendra secured 80,233 votes, according to Election Commission data. Ajit Pawar won by a margin of 1,00,899 votes.

The Baramati constituency in Maharashtra, long regarded as a bastion of Sharad Pawar's family, witnessed a familial and political showdown. In the first election after the party split, Ajit Pawar, a seven-time MLA who broke ranks to join the Shiv Sena-BJP coalition led by Eknath Shinde, faced a strong challenge from his nephew, 32-year-old Yugendra Pawar.

The family rivalry follows closely on the heels of the Lok Sabha elections, where Sharad Pawar's daughter, Supriya Sule, defeated Ajit Pawar's wife, Sunetra Pawar, by over 1.5 lakh votes.

Maharashtra's total electors have reached over 9.70 crore, and among them, approximately 22.2 lakh are first-time voters aged between 18 years and 19 years, according to the latest data from the Election Commission of India.

Maharashtra witnessed a record voter turnout in the state Assembly elections on Nov. 20 with the overall voting percentage reaching 65.02%, the highest in the last 30 years since 1995 polls.

Despite muted participation from urban voters, Maharashtra Assembly elections saw more voter turnout than the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, where the voting percentage stood at 61.39%.

Pune district saw a voter turnout of 61.62%, while the Baramati constituency saw a voter turnout of 71.57% in the elections held on Nov. 20. Voting for all the 288 seats in Maharashtra Assembly elections 2024 was held in a single phase on Wednesday.

In 2019, Ajit Pawar, then with the undivided NCP, triumphed over BJP's Gopichand Padalkar by a margin of 1.65 lakh votes.

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