Maharashtra: Dhananjay Munde new leader of opposition in legislative assembly

In an end to the deadlock, the state legislative council finally got a leader of the opposition with NCP's Dhananjay Munde being appointed to the post. Dhananjay is the nephew of late Union minister and BJP strongman Gopinath Munde.

Council chairperson Shivajirao Deshmukh announced Dhananjay's name in the house on Monday evening.

The NCP, which is the largest party in the upper house, had staked claimed to the post of the principal opposition in the two houses. The Congress has 42 MLAs in the assembly as against the NCP's 41. However, the NCP had claimed the support of three independents in the lower house.

The appointment may pave the way for the Congress getting to appoint its nominee as the opposition leader in the assembly.

Once seen as Munde Sr's political heir, Dhananjay, 39, was passed over in favour of cousin Pankaja in the 2009 assembly polls. Though he was nominated to the legislative council in 2010, the seeds of a bitter family feud were sown and the very next year, Dhananjay split with his uncle formally and later joined the NCP.

Incidentally, despite the Modi wave, sympathy for her father who was a union minister when died in a freak road mishap in Delhi earlier this year and the Shiv Sena's support for her candidature, Pankaja, who is now Maharashtra's rural development minister, could win by just 25,895 votes in her father's pocket borough of Parli in Beed district against her estranged cousin.

In 2009, Pankaja had trounced Prof TP Munde of the Congress by over 36,000 votes from the constituency located in Maharashtra's dust bowl of Marathwada which had been represented by her father in the legislature since 1980, barring a shock defeat in 1985. In 2009, Munde Sr contested and won the Lok Sabha polls from Beed in a contest which had been polarised around caste (OBC/ Vanjari vs Marathas) by the NCP.