Five seats witness tough fight; Sharma, Pramod & Saha challenged

By Indian Cooperative’s reckoning, intense electoral fights on more than four seats of the governing council of NCUI are expected, though the final picture would be clear only by today evening when nominations end.

The one with the highest number of voters is multistate co-op societies and it is going to see the toughest fight. Till Tuesday the outgoing director Pramod Kumar Singh and S R Satishchandra Chairman of CAMPCO had filed their nomination papers from this seat. Pramod is being supported both by Chandra Pal and IFFCO, as he is on the board of the latter.

Satishchandra has the support of Sahakar Bharati leaders. This category has 45 votes and it is said that Sahakar Bharati has many of its sympathizers in the list. But Pramod sounded confident and said he would win with greater margins compared to the last election when he had defeated K Padmanbhan.

Another interesting fight would be between Mudit Verma and Chandrasekhar Singh of Ballia for the constituency consisting of Co-op Housing Federation, Dairy Co-op Federation, Cooperative Sugarcane Federation and Cooperative Consumer Federations. There are 13 eligible voters from this constituency. Mudit Verma is perhaps the only other candidate after the would-be-President Dileep Sanghani, who enjoys the support of both the groups– Sahakar Bharati and Chandrapal-Bijender.

The contest between Ashok Dabas and V V P Nair, though looks one sided in favour of the latter at the moment but it may spring a surprise. With Bijender Singh throwing weight behind Nair, he looks assured of his victory. But insiders say a last-minute ministerial interference in favour of Dabas may lead to a pact between leaders where Nair is sacrificed.

There are 15 voters from this constituency comprising Cooperative Spinning Mills federation, Cooperative Fishermen Federation, Labour Cooperative Federation, National Heavy Engineering Cooperative Limited, Tribal Cooperative Federation and State level federation of Handloom/Industrial Cooperatives. Even Delhi CM has a say in the matter and thus an uncertainty does prevail.

In the state co-op unions, the constituency no 5 comprising Bihar, West Bengal and Sikkim is another unresolved case. Though Vishal has support of several top leaders, the incumbent Swarn Kamal Saha is also no less popular with them. There are 3 voters and there may be three candidates as well. Indian Cooperative has gathered that the two–Saha and Sikkim’s L P Kafley have decided to support each other. While one of them would be GC member the other one would occupy the high seat of Kalyani ICM.

Constituency number 6 comprising Odisha, MP and Chhattisgarh is also going to be tough for the contestants. S N Sharma’s boat has been rocked by the poaching of Odisha’s voter Hemant Nayak by Sahakar Bharati, sources add. With MP and Odisha on their side, Nayak could be a successful Sahakar Bharati candidate.

There may be some other constituencies which may baffle poll analysts as things are changing too fast at the NCUI elections.