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BJP, Sena finalise seat-sharing in Maharashtra

The ruling Shiv Sena will contest 21 seats, one more than in 1996. The party has left 26 constituencies to its electoral ally, the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The combine has finalised seat-sharing for 47 of the 48 Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra for the coming Lok Sabha election. The remaining seat -- Ichalkaranji in western Maharashtra -- remained undecided, according to a joint media note issued after the agreement was finalised at Chief Minister Manohar Joshi's official residence 'Varsha'.

The Sena was represented at the meeting by party chief Bal Thackeray, his son Udhav, Joshi, Subhash Desai and MP Satish Pradhan. As for the BJP, it was represented by its national general secretary Pramod Mahajan, Deputy Chief Minister Gopinath Munde, BJP state unit president Suryabhan Wahadane-Patil and party's state unit general secretary Sharad Kulkarni.

The BJP had left the Karad constituency in the western region to the Sena. The seat was won by Congress's Prithviraj Chavan in the 1996 Lok Sabha election, defeating the BJP-backed independent candidate Jayawantrao Bhosale by a margin of more than 149,000 votes.

Both Karad and Ichalkaranji are traditional Congress strongholds.

The BJP lost the Ichalkaranji seat in the last election to Congress candidate Kallappa Awade by a margin of 28,510 votes.

As per the agreement, the 21 seats to be contested by the Sena are: Bombay South-Central, Bombay North-Central, Bombay North-West, Kolaba, Ratnagiri, Rajapur, Thane, Nashik, Ahmednagar, Aurangabad, Parbhani, Hingoli, Osmanabad, Satara, Karad, Kolhapur, Khed, Ramtek, Washim, Amravati and Buldhana.

The seats allotted to the BJP are Bombay South, Bombay North, Bombay North-East, Dahanu, Malegaon, Dhule, Nandurbar, Erandole, Jalgaon, Kopergaon, Jalna, Beed, Latur, Nanded, Pune, Baramati, Sangli, Solapur, Pandharpur, Akola, Wardha, Yavatmal, Nagpur, Bhandara, Chandrapur and Chimur.

In the last election, the Sena contested 20 seats and won 15 while its partner, the BJP ran for 28 seats, winning 18 of them.

Except one change -- of the BJP leaving Karad to the Sena -- the two alliance partners would contest for the same respective seats chosen by them in the last election.

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