Fragmentation muddies the poll picture in north-west Maharashtra

All three major leaders of the ruling Mahayuti coalition — the Bharatiya Janata Party's Devendra Fadnavis, the Shiv Sena’s Eknath Shinde and the Nationalist Congress Party's Ajit Pawar — have prestige, fortune and power at stake in the upcoming Assembly election in Maharashtra.

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Yet, from the looks of the contest on the ground, this election seems a make-or-break situation for Mr. Pawar more than his colleagues in the coalition.Dindori is a Scheduled Tribes reserved seat in Nashik district. The sitting MLA, Narhari Zirwal, belongs to the NCP and also serves as the Deputy Speaker in the current Assembly. A seasoned tribal politician, his fealty to Mr. Ajit Pawar precedes the split within the party — he was one of the NCP MLAs who accompanied Mr. Ajit Pawar to the Raj Bhavan when Mr. Fadnavis was sworn in as the Chief Minister in an early morning ceremony in November 2019. He now has the unenviable task of retaining an Assembly seat in a constituency where the NCP(Sharad Pawar) led by a large margin — more than 82,000 votes and by nearly 34 percentage points — in the Lok Sabha election.