BJP, which has seen leaders from other parties making a beeline for joining it, is likely to receive a blow in Maharashtra as its sitting MP from Jalgaon Unmesh Patil is likely to quit the party and join the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena (UBT).
Patil, who is disgruntled over being denied a ticket by the saffron party from Jalgaon, met Thackeray at his residence in Mumbai and is all set to switch his loyalties to Shiv Sena (UBT) on Wednesday.
In a surprise decision, the BJP denied a ticket to Patil for the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls and replaced him with Smita Wagh from the Jalgaon seat.
Earlier in the day, Patil met senior Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Raut, which sparked the speculations of him quitting the BJP. After meeting Raut, he said, “All your questions will be answered in detail, but today is not the appropriate day for it.”
Patil said he and Raut have been colleagues in Parliament and he wanted to have a dialogue with the latter. His meeting with Raut was only an attempt to protect the friendship that goes beyond politics, he added.
“I have known Raut for many years, and we have worked closely in Delhi. I was in Lok Sabha and Raut was in Rajya Sabha. The meeting was not political,” Patil said.
The Jalgaon MP will be the first major leader to quit the saffron party in Maharashtra ahead of Lok Sabha polls.
In 2019, Unmesh Patil won with a huge margin of more than 4 lakh votes from Jalgaon. While he got 7.13 lakh votes, the second-placed Gulabrao Deokar of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) got 3.02 lakh votes. In 2014, Unmesh Patil was elected as an MLA from the Chalisgaon constituency in Maharashtra and served as the chairman of the Maharashtra State Cooperative Sugar Factories Federation Limited from 2015 to 2019.
