New Delhi: The Maha Vikas Aghadi will launch its joint campaign in Maharashtra with a mega event in the capital Mumbai on November 4 in which top national leaders of the Congress, Shiv Sena UBT and NCP-SP will address the gathering.
Former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi, party chief Mallikarjun Kharge, former Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray of Sena UBT and Sharad Pawar head of NCP-SP will address the event where the MVA will showcase its strength against the ruling Shiv Sena Shinde-NCP-AP-BJP alliance.
“The festival season has set in and people will get busy over the next few days. Thus, political activity will be restricted. The MVA joint campaign will start from the first week of November. Hence, we will use this period for drawing campaign strategy,” AICC secretary in-charge of Maharashtra Qazi Nizamuddin told ETV Bharat.
According to Congress insiders, after starting from Mumbai, the joint campaign will gradually cover the entire state during which all the MVA partners will seek votes for each other. “As we are fighting as a group, we will focus on our candidates naturally, but our leaders will also seek votes for the candidates of allies. The leaders of alliance parties will also do the same,” said Nizamuddin.
All the 288 Assembly seats in Maharashtra will have polling on November 20. The campaigning will end on November 18. The results will be out on Nov 23.
After nominations closed on Oct 29, the MVA state leaders will meet on October 30 to discuss the joint MVA campaign which will focus majorly on the promises of the opposition alliance and the failures of the state government.
“The state government came to power through illegal means by breaking up the parties like Shiv Sena and NCP. Sadly, the legal battle over the validity of the state government took a long time and now the next elections are just weeks away. The matter is now in the court of the people and they will do justice. The MVA is the winning side in this poll battle and will form the next government,” Maharashtra Congress chief Nana Patole told ETV Bharat.
Patole filed his nomination from the Sakoli seat
A major focus of the poll promises would be on farmers' welfare, including loan waiver facilities for them. “Jobs for the youth, safety of women and promotion of industry will be other focus areas of the alliance,” said Nizamuddin.
Initially, it was agreed within the MVA that each partner would contest 85 seats each, but later it turned out that the Congress was able to get 100 seats in the alliance. This was in line with the claim the state unit chief had been making as the Congress had emerged as the single largest party in the state with 14 out of 48 Lok Sabha seats.
“Give and take is normal during any seat-sharing negotiation, but the alliance is strong,” said Patole.
According to Congress insiders, the seat-sharing negotiations took a while to settle as all the three allies felt they had a better chance on some seats, which is why Congress handled the issue with care and announced four lists of candidates over the past week as the names were cleared by Kharge and Rahul Gandhi.
