In a setback for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Nationalist Congress Party-Sharadchandra Pawar (NCP-SP) candidate Harshada Jadhav-Deshmukh has won the Pune Graduates’ constituency seat in the Maharashtra Legislative Council elections, defeating BJP candidate Dr Smita Jadhav.
Deshmukh secured 1,11,717 votes against Jadhav’s 1,02,797 at the end of the 39th round of counting. Shiv Sena (UBT) candidate Sunil Modi polled around 3,000 votes.
The result marks a setback for the BJP, which had backed Jadhav in its attempt to wrest the graduates’ constituency from the NCP-SP.
For Deshmukh, the victory also carries a personal significance, fulfilling a long-standing political aspiration in her family. Her father, Prabhakar Deshmukh, a retired Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, had contested the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly election as an independent candidate from the Man-Khatav constituency in Satara district. He lost that election by around 3,000 votes.
His daughter has now made her electoral debut with a victory in the Legislative Council (MLC) polls.
An engineer by qualification, Deshmukh graduated in mechanical engineering from the Vishwakarma Institute of Technology (VIT), Pune. She subsequently pursued an MSc in Finance and Management from Cranfield University in the United Kingdom and an ME from Savitribai Phule Pune University.
Her educational background combines engineering with finance and management, before her entry into electoral politics.
The Pune Graduates’ constituency is one of the constituencies represented in Maharashtra’s Legislative Council, the upper house of the state legislature. Elections to graduates’ constituencies are restricted to eligible registered graduate voters, making them distinct from elections to general Assembly constituencies.
Deshmukh’s win strengthens the NCP-SP’s position in the contest and marks a political milestone for her family, while dealing a blow to the BJP’s bid to capture the seat.
