BJP's central minister faces off against old foe

In the Jalna Lok Sabha constituency, BJP leader Raosaheb Danve, the Union Minister of State, is facing Kalyan Kale of Congress. Ranked among the BJP's safe seats, this time Jalna, Maharashtra's 'mosambi hub', is witnessing a high-profile electoral war between a central minister and his old political foe from the Congress.

The Mahayuti-BJP's heavyweight candidate, Minister of State for Railways, Raosaheb Danve, a five-time sitting MP, is now aiming for a 'double hat-trick' in Jalna which he converted from a mercurial constituency to a party bastion since his election to the LS from here in 1999.

This time, Danve is pitted against his old rival of the 2009 LS elections from the newlydelimited constituency, the Congress' Kalyan Kale. They had a tough fight but Danve scraped through narrowly, trouncing Kale with an 8,000vote margin. Apart from Danve and Kale, there is also the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) nominee Prabhakar Bakale in the fray.