Maharashtra Congress chief Nana Patole has exuded confidence in the victory of Maha Vikas Aghadi in Maharashtra despite exit polls giving the ruling Mahayuti an edge in the state.
Patole said the MVA will form the next government and its chief minister will take oath on November 25.
On exit polls predicting a win for the NDA’s Mahayuti alliance or a hung assembly, Patole said the pollsters had predicted Congress victory in Haryana but lost there. This time the party will win.
“Last time they predicted a Congress victory in Haryana and we lost. This time they are predicting our defeat. We will surely win,” Patole said in an interview with NDTV.
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From the Mahayuti camp, Bharatiya Janata Party’s Milind Deora is equally confident about the alliance’s victory in the state. “I am not into numbers… but we will definitely win,” Deora said.
The alliance, working its way from the Lok Sabha election setback has “left no stones unturned…and checked all boxes,” he said.
Patole, however, brushed off the possibility saying, “When Prime Minister Narendra Modi could not prevail during the Lok Sabha elections, when will the likes of (Chief Minister) Eknath Shinde and Devendra Fadnavis do?”
Without going into overall numbers, Patole predicted that the Congress would win 35 seats in the Vidarbha region alone and the alliance would make a clean sweep of the zone, winning at least 48 to 50 of the 62 seats.
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The Congress had fielded candidates on 103 seats while Shiv Sena (UBT) contested on 89 and Nationalist Congress Party (Sharafchandra Pawar) on 87 seats.
An aggregate on nine exit polls on Wednesday predicted a lead for the Mahayuti alliance on 150 seats while the MVA is expected to get 125 seats.
People’s Pulse, Matrize, Chanakya Strategies, and Times Now JVC were among the pollsters predicting an NDA victory while Dainik Bhaskar, Lokshahi Marathi Rudra and Electoral Edge were among the naysayers.
Voting for all the 288 seats in Maharashtra concluded on Wednesday and the votes will be counted on November 23.