In a result that has reshaped the political conversation around the ongoing Legislative Council elections, the Congress on Thursday retained the Nagpur Division Graduates constituency in the Maharashtra Legislative Council, defeating the Bharatiya Janata Party in a seat the ruling party had made a prestige battle.
Sitting member of the Legislative Council Abhijit Wanjari held on to the seat, defeating the BJP candidate Sudhakar Kohale by 3,271 votes after a counting process that stretched for more than forty hours.
The counting of votes began on the morning of Tuesday, October 27, and concluded only in the early hours of Thursday, October 29. In the final tally, Wanjari polled 67,231 votes against 63,960 for Kohale, a former member of the Legislative Assembly. The contest went to a second round of counting because no candidate secured the required quota of first-preference votes, and it was in the transfer of second-preference votes from eliminated candidates that Wanjari moved ahead.
After the second round of counting of first-preference votes on Wednesday, Kohale had actually been in the lead. He had polled 60,924 votes at that stage, against 56,630 for Wanjari, a margin of 4,294 votes. Independent candidate Nitesh Karale had secured 24,249 votes.
But as candidates with fewer votes were eliminated one by one and their second preferences were redistributed, the balance shifted decisively in Wanjari's favour, and he finished with the winning margin of 3,271 votes.
The result is a significant setback for the BJP, and not only because it lost a seat it desperately wanted to win back. Nagpur is the hometown of Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Union Minister Nitin Gadkari, both of whom campaigned extensively for Kohale. Nagpur is also the city where the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has its headquarters, which gives every electoral contest there a symbolic weight well beyond the seat itself.
The graduates constituency has a long association with the BJP. Gadkari represented the seat in the Legislative Council for twenty-four years, from July 1990 to May 2014, before moving fully into national politics. Wanjari, a lawyer and educationist, first broke that hold in 2020, when he defeated the BJP candidate Sandip Joshi.
His victory this time means the Congress has now beaten the BJP in this constituency twice in a row, a point the state Congress leadership was quick to underline.
State Congress chief Harshwardhan Sapkal said the party had defeated the BJP for the second consecutive time in the city of the RSS headquarters and in the home city of Fadnavis and Gadkari. Congress leaders also seized on the result to answer the BJP's taunts from earlier in the week.
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had asked on social media how many of the twenty-eight Legislative Council seats across Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar and Karnataka the Congress had won, noting that the polls used ballot papers. BJP leaders had described the Congress tally as a big zero.
The Nagpur result broke that run and gave the Congress its first victory in the current round of Council elections. Maharashtra Congress workers circulated a screenshot of a social media post by Fadnavis, later deleted, which had said the Congress had scored a big fat zero in the polls. The party's message was blunt: the post had been written before the full results were in hand, and the Nagpur verdict had forced its deletion.
Wanjari himself kept his reaction brief after the win. He said simply that the one who wins is the champion, a remark that was widely shared by his supporters on social media.
The Nagpur contest was one of five Maharashtra Legislative Council seats for which polling was held on October 23. Three were graduates constituencies and two were teachers constituencies, and the overall outcome in the state favoured the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi, which won three of the five seats. The ruling Mahayuti alliance secured the remaining two, with the BJP and the Shiv Sena winning one seat each.
The Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) won the Pune and Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar graduates constituencies. Both seats had previously been held by the undivided Nationalist Congress Party before its split in 2023. In Pune, NCP (SP) candidate Harshada Deshmukh-Jadhav defeated the BJP's Smita Jadhav. The Shiv Sena candidate Kiran Sarnaik won the Amravati Teachers constituency, while the BJP's Kaustubh Gawade secured the Pune Teachers seat.
The Maharashtra Legislative Council has seventy-eight members, and its graduates and teachers constituencies are among the more unusual features of India's state legislatures. Graduates constituencies are elected by voters who hold a university degree, while teachers constituencies are elected by school and college teachers.
These seats often produce results that differ from Assembly elections, because the electorate is smaller, more literate and more closely engaged with local educational and professional issues.
Thirty-eight candidates contested the Nagpur graduates seat, but the real fight was always between Wanjari and Kohale. The BJP had worked hard to reduce any split in its support base. Independent candidate Anil Sole backed the BJP nominee on October 12, after Fadnavis intervened personally. Even so, the BJP could not recover a seat it had held for decades before 2020.
The wider picture across the four states that went to Council polls on October 23 is mixed for every party. The BJP and its allies won sixteen of the twenty-eight seats. In Congress-ruled Karnataka, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance swept all four seats, a result that embarrassed the Congress in a state where it holds power.
In Bihar, the BJP won three of eight seats, with the Janata Dal (United), the Rashtriya Janata Dal and Prashant Kishor's Jan Suraaj Party winning one each and independents taking two. In Uttar Pradesh, where results had been declared for nine of eleven seats, the BJP won six and the Samajwadi Party three, with two results still awaited.
For the Congress, Nagpur therefore stands out as the exception in an otherwise poor round of Council elections. The party lost all four seats in Karnataka and drew a blank in Bihar. Its single win came in the most symbolically charged constituency of all, in the backyard of two of the BJP's most senior leaders and in the city that houses the RSS headquarters.
That symbolism is precisely why the result has attracted attention far beyond Maharashtra. Legislative Council elections are usually low-turnout, low-drama affairs, decided by a narrow electorate and rarely followed closely outside the state. This time, the combination of the Prime Minister's public jibe, the marathon counting process and the prestige attached to Nagpur turned one graduates seat into a national talking point.
The BJP, for its part, can point to the broader tally across the four states, where its alliance still finished well ahead. But in Nagpur, the party lost a seat it had targeted, in a city it considers its own, to a sitting Congress member who had already beaten it once before. The Congress, meanwhile, has a victory to celebrate and a rebuttal to the charge that it could not win a single Council seat.
What happens next in Maharashtra politics will depend on how both sides read this result. For the Congress and its Maha Vikas Aghadi partners, the three-out-of-five outcome in the state offers some encouragement after a difficult period. For the BJP and the Mahayuti, the Nagpur loss is a reminder that even strongholds cannot be taken for granted, and that a lead in early counting rounds does not always survive the transfer of second preferences.
The counting process itself also deserves attention. Graduates and teachers constituency elections use a system in which voters mark preferences, and if no candidate reaches the required quota on first preferences, the votes of eliminated candidates are redistributed.
In Nagpur, that system produced a reversal: Kohale led comfortably after the first-preference rounds, but Wanjari overtook him once the preferences of supporters of eliminated candidates, including Karale's voters, were taken into account. It was a textbook illustration of how preference voting can reward the candidate with the broader second-choice appeal.
As the dust settles, Wanjari returns to the Legislative Council for another term, representing graduates across the Nagpur division. The BJP returns to the drawing board in a city where it once seemed unbeatable. And the Congress, which had been mocked for drawing a blank, finally has a seat on the board, won in the place where it will sting its rivals the most.
(Reporting based on The Hindu and The Indian Express.)