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This is an archive article published on May 19, 2014

The man who gave Supriya Sule a scare

Jankar had contested against Sharad Pawar when he switched to Madha from Baramati in 2009.

When Supriya Sule won elections in Baramati Lok Sabha constituency, the NCP camp was quite relieved. In a constituency where Sharad Pawar had been winning consistently with high margins, the victory margin of the NCP chief’s daughter was 70,000 votes that too after trailing in several assembly segments in the initial hours on counting day.

short article insert When counting proceeded, rival Mahadeo Jankar was leading in several Assembly segments and that led to exchange of SMSes like “Is Sule trailing, really?” Jankar, a trained electronics engineer of the Rashtriya Samaj Paksha, supported by BJP and Shiv Sena, lost in the end. Two days after results, NCP Baramati president Sambhaji Holkar said, “We did well in Baramati assembly but the other five segments were beyond our control.”

Jankar had contested against Sharad Pawar when he switched to Madha from Baramati in 2009. Jankar had then got a total of only 50,000 votes, which, against Pawar, was enough to get him noticed.

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When Jankar contested against Sule in Baramati this time, Pawars left no stone unturned. Sule led from the front, campaigning under scorching sun for 12-13 hours a day.

Jankar, from Palaswade village of Satara district had left home 23 years back. “He has taken a vow never to return home and has severed ties with relatives,” says Satish Thombre, a close associate.

For Jankar, it is not a defeat. “It was not a defeat for me…It was a moral victory,” he says, vowing to change the face of Baramati.

As for Sule’s cousin and deputy CM Ajit Pawar allegedly threatening people of Masalwadi village that water supply to their village will be cut off if they did not vote for Sule, Jankar says,”I will persuade EC to debar him from polls.”
Ajit Pawar denied that he had issued any threat.

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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