Rebel With a Cause

Congress rebel candidate Vishal Patil fights as an independent, defeats the BJP candidate and sitting MP by over one lakh votes and rejoins the Congress

- Shweta Desai

IT was an affair that was meant to happen. Just that it took Vishal Patil a little over 30 years to finally win over the love of his life—the Congress. On June 6, two days after winning the Sangli Lok Sabha constituency with a margin of over one lakh votes, he headed straight to 10 Janpath, his face pink with the celebratory gulal. Minutes later, he announced his official engagement with the Congress by sharing his photo on X, flanked by Rahul and Sonia Gandhi, and he captioned it Hum Saath Saath Hai. 

Patil defeated the BJP’s incumbent MP Sanjaykaka Patil as an independent candidate but later pledged his unconditional support to the Congress. The endorsement helped the party to take its overall winning tally in the Lok Sabha to 100—for the first time since 2014—and enabled Patil’s long-awaited return to the party’s fold as a Congressman.

The Congress ideology runs deep in Patil and his family. His grandfather, the late Vasantdada Patil, was a stalwart leader and two-time chief minister of Maharashtra. His father Prakash Patil was an MP and his brother Pratik Patil is the former Minister of State for coal.