What happened in the Parbhani Zilla Parishad and Panchayat Samitis in the last elections in 2017?
Voting will be held across 12 districts in Maharashtra for 731 Zilla Parishad seats and 1462 Panchayat Samitis on Saturday. The previous elections to the Parbhani Zilla Parishad were held in February 2017. Here's what happened in those elections nine years ago;
In 2017, the Parbhani Zilla Parishad and Panchayat Samiti elections showcased a highly competitive and fragmented political landscape, distinctive from the clear sweeps seen in other parts of Maharashtra. As a district in the Marathwada region, Parbhani has traditionally been a battleground for the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), and the 2017 results reignited this rivalry significantly. Overall, NCP won the majority of the seats in this region.
What happened in the Parbhani Zilla Parishad elections in 2017?
The results for the 54-seat Parbhani Zilla Parishad were significantly split, leading to a "hung" council where no single party secured an absolute majority. The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) emerged as the single largest party, winning 24 seats. The Shiv Sena followed closely with 12 seats, while the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which had been aggressively expanding its rural footprint, secured only five seats. The Indian National Congress won 6 seats, and the remaining seats went to independent candidates.
Even in the 108 seats across nine Panchayat Samitis, there was no split mandate to any single party. The vote share reflected the intense four-way contest. The Shiv Sena secured the highest vote percentage at approximately 26%, while the Nationalist Congress Party followed with roughly 24% of the vote share and the INC saw a surge to approximately 21%, a significant increase from its previous performances in the district. The BJP also maintained a steady 15% of the votes.
As far as the total seats won are concerned, NCP won a staggering 41 of them, emerging as the single largest party, but they couldn't cross the majority mark of 55 seats. Shiv Sena followed the NCP closely by winning 31 seats and then Congress came next with 17 seats, followed by BJP, which could only win 10 out of 108 seats in Panchayat Samiti elections in Parbhani. However, even this performance from the BJP was considered a significant shift in the trend in the politics in the region.