Nomination filing ends: Chaos till last-minute, parties still gathering data on candidates in fray

“We don’t know the exact number of letters issued to aspirants for contesting the PMC elections. This was done in haste so it will take time to find the exact number but the party will withdraw candidates from the seats where the alliance partner BJP has a strong candidate,” said Sena leader Uday Samant.

Witnessing chaos till the last minute of filing nominations for the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) elections, none of the political parties were able to declare the number of candidates contesting the 165 seats of the civic body as discussion on seat-sharing continued till the end.

The BJP, which had announced a pre-poll alliance with the Shiv Sena led by Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, kept its list under wraps to avoid any rebellion considering it had over 2,500 aspirants for the 165 seats.

It held discussions with the Shiv Sena over seat-sharing but offered only 16 seats, which led the Shinde-led party to protest and distribute randomly official party letters to its aspirants to contest the elections. Party leaders claimed to have given letters to around 100 aspirants.

In the alliance between Ajit Pawar-led NCP and Sharad Pawar-led NCP (SP), the same situation existed till the end of the day. “We are working on ascertaining how many aspirants were given the party letter for candidature. The letters were given in haste from last night so there is no ready record available with us till now,” said city NCP working president Pradeep Desmukh.

He said that they were also getting information from NCP (SP) on how many letters were issued to their candidates for contesting the elections of the Pune civic body. “The NCP (SP) had issued around 70 letters to aspirants to contest the civic polls,” said a party leader.

In another alliance, the Congress, Shiv Sena (UBT) and MNS are yet to compile the information on the number of candidates they have fielded. “All the letters of the party to its official candidates were issued in a short span of last one day. There was too much chaos, so record was not maintained but the information is being compiled now,” a Congress leader said.