A childhood friend from the Wardha district, a die-hard Congress sympathiser, sounded upset on Saturday. He said the ‘hand’ won’t be seen any longer in the Wardha constituency, because the NCP-Sharad Pawar had fielded its candidate. “Why?” he wondered. He said it is where the Sevagram Ashram, Mahatma Gandhi’s home from 1936 to his death in 1948, is. It is from where the Mahatma guided the Congress and the independence movement, he said, apparently miffed by the idea that the symbol he had voted forever, may not return to Wardha.

“The local Congress leaders say they didn`t have a suitable candidate to take on the BJP. But as it turned out, a former Congress MLA ultimately became NCP’s candidate. What do you make of it?" the irritated friend asked. I told him that historically significant Wardha wasn’t the only constituency that was lost to the ally and that the Congress was on the verge of losing a major chunk of its share in Mumbai, where the party was founded over a century ago. I told him further that the party might lose whatever is left of it in the Mumbai metropolitan region (MMR) and elsewhere in Maharashtra.