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More’s nomination angers MES workers in Belgaum

Belgaum: The decision of Maharashtra Ekikaran Samiti (MES) to field the former Mayor of Belgaum Vijay Pandurang More in Belgaum North Assembly Constituency for the May 22 elections has sparked angry protests against its leadership.

A group of MES workers, believed to be supporters of senior MES leader Deepak Dalvi, on Friday morning threw stones at the house of Kiran Thakur, who is a senior MES leader and editor of popular Marathi daily newspaper Tarun Bharat.

Miscreants threw stones at Lokmanya Credit Co-operative Society in Bhagyanagar locality. Mr. Thakur is the founder-director of the society. Sources in the MES told The Hindu that the Dalvi camp was given a raw deal by MES leadership and rejected the claim of Mr. Dalvi to contest from Belgaum North.

It may be recalled here that Mr. Dalvi was arrested by the police in connection with violence against Kannada workers and was in Hindalga Jail for more than two months.

He had lost the elections in 1989 and 2004 as an independent.

But, the MES seems to have gone by the “good image” of Mr. More not only among the Marathi-speaking people but also among the Kannada-speaking and other lingustic communities cutting across religious and caste barriers.

Mr. More, who was elected as Mayor in 2005 when the post was reserved for Scheduled Caste, had faced the wrath of the Karnataka Rakshana Vedike following a controversial resolution on “boundary dispute” between Karnataka and Maharashtra on the question of Belgaum and other areas.

The vedike activists had attacked Mr. More, the former mayor Shivaji Sunthakar and former MLA B.I. Patil near Vidhana Soudha and daubed their faces with black paint on November 11, 2005.

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