Talking to reporters, Rane, who spent four decades in Shiv Sena before joining Congress and then BJP, said he checked Delkar’s poll symbol after the Uddhav Thackeray-led party claimed it had won the first Lok Sabha seat outside Maharashtra.
“I checked her election symbol. Turns out she contested using the ‘batsman’ symbol and not Shiv Sena’s bow and arrow symbol,” the BJP leader said.
“Shiv Sena is in the habit of appropriating credit for someone else’s victory. They have now started making ludicrous claims that they will capture Delhi,” said Rane, who was Maharashtra chief minister for a few months while in that party.
A source close to Delkar said she contested and won as a Shiv Sena candidate, but could not get the Sena poll symbol allotted due to a procedural issue. The Election Commission had also announced that she had won as a Shiv Sena nominee.
“Normally a state/regional party has to inform election officials within 72 hours of poll notification that it is contesting in another state. But this did not happen and as a result, Kalaben was allotted the batsman symbol,” the source said.
The batsman symbol proved beneficial to her as it was the same symbol on which her late husband had won the earlier election, the source said.
Rane said Shiv Sena won 56 seats in 2019 Maharashtra Assembly elections only due to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s charisma. Now that party won’t be able to win more than eight seats,” he added.
Delkar won the recent bypoll with a margin of 51,269 votes by defeating her nearest BJP rival Mahesh Gavit.
Riding on a sympathy wave post the death of her husband, who allegedly hanged himself in a hotel in Mumbai in February, Kalaben Delkar (50) bagged 1,18,035 votes. Gavit polled 66,766 votes.
Counting of votes was held in Silvassa city of the Dadra and Nagar Haveli district, which is a part of the Union Territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu.