After flop show in Lok Sabha polls, VBA says insulted by Maha Vikas Aghadi

Congress to take a call on whether to include VBA in the Opposition alliance for the Maharashtra Assembly polls

VBA said the Maha Vikas Aghadi insulted the party but still it tried its best to be a part of the Opposition alliance. (Express photo/File)

The Prakash Ambedkar-led Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA), which once again failed to win a single seat in the Lok Sabha elections, on Sunday said the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) insulted the party but still it tried its best to be a part of the Opposition alliance.

“We will introspect our failure in the Lok Sabha elections…Some of the constituents of the MVA deliberately did not get us included in the alliance. We were invited for meetings, but that was all for the media and the voters. We got trapped in their game plan. We were insulted… We could not convince the voters about the attitude of the MVA against us,” the VBA said in a post on X.

“In the last meeting, the MVA told us that we would be given two seats. One was Mumbai North and the other was Akola. However, the MVA used to tell the media that it was offering four to six seats. But these seats did not include the ones where our candidates had secured more than one lakh votes. Moreover, Mumbai North was a difficult seat. And the Akola seat was also an uncertain one. It makes sense to contest on our own strength rather than go with the INDIA bloc and get defeated,” VBA spokesperson Siddharth Mokele said.

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“It was the VBA that tried to get itself included in the MVA. The MVA invited us for a few select meetings but not for all meetings. There is still some time for the Assembly elections. We will use this time to interact more with the voters,” he added.

Asked about the VBA’s charge, Congress spokesperson Atul Londhe said, “The MVA had offered at least five seats to the VBA but they sought much more, because of which the discussions failed… As for the assembly elections, we will soon take a call on whether to include them in the MVA.”

Manoj Dattatrye More

Manoj More has been working with the Indian Express since 1992. For the first 16 years, he worked on the desk, edited stories, made pages, wrote special stories and handled The Indian Express edition. In 31 years of his career, he has regularly written stories on a range of topics, primarily on civic issues like state of roads, choked drains, garbage problems, inadequate transport facilities and the like. He has also written aggressively on local gondaism. He has primarily written civic stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad, Khadki, Maval and some parts of Pune. He has also covered stories from Kolhapur, Satara, Solapur, Sangli, Ahmednagar and Latur. He has had maximum impact stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad industrial city which he has covered extensively for the last three decades. Manoj More has written over 20,000 stories. 10,000 of which are byline stories. Most of the stories pertain to civic issues and political ones. The biggest achievement of his career is getting a nearly two kilometre road done on Pune-Mumbai highway in Khadki in 2006. He wrote stories on the state of roads since 1997. In 10 years, nearly 200 two-wheeler riders had died in accidents due to the pathetic state of the road. The local cantonment board could not get the road redone as it lacked funds. The then PMC commissioner Pravin Pardeshi took the initiative, went out of his way and made the Khadki road by spending Rs 23 crore from JNNURM Funds. In the next 10 years after the road was made by the PMC, less than 10 citizens had died, effectively saving more than 100 lives. Manoj More's campaign against tree cutting on Pune-Mumbai highway in 1999 and Pune-Nashik highway in 2004 saved 2000 trees. During Covid, over 50 doctors were asked to pay Rs 30 lakh each for getting a job with PCMC. The PCMC administration alerted Manoj More who did a story on the subject, asking then corporators how much money they demanded....The story worked as doctors got the job without paying a single paisa. Manoj More has also covered the "Latur drought" situation in 2015 when a "Latur water train" created quite a buzz in Maharashtra. He also covered the Malin tragedy where over 150 villagers had died. Manoj More is on Facebook with 4.9k followers (Manoj More), on twitter manojmore91982 ... Read More

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