State Revenue Minister Narayan Rane of the Congress is pitted against Parshuram Uparkar of Shiv Sena in a straight contest in Malvan in Konkan region.
Over 16 lakh voters are eligible to cast their franchise in the by-election necessitated by the death of Dutt on May 25.
Shiv Sena executive president Uddav Thackeray, who is in Pune, is expected to make the formal announcement on Satpotdar's candidature in Mumbai.
In her statement, Dutt has hailed and thanked her "mentor" United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi.
'No one talks about the Mumbai riots anymore, though like Delhi 1984, the guilty have not been punished. In Gujarat, many powerful leaders of the state's ruling party are in jail for their role in the riots... In Mumbai, only one politician of the Shiv Sena, a former MP, was convicted of hate speech, along with two other Shiv Sainiks, one of whom was a corporator and the other a junior functionary... So why the apathy? Could it be because despite these statistics and the widely-publicised findings of the Srikrishna Commission, what remained in public consciousness was the violence by the Muslims, thanks to a highly efficient Sena propaganda machine? There's no demand for it, but would an SIT probe into the closed cases of the Mumbai riots help today?' The fadeout of Mumbai's riots from public debate can be called a triumph of the communal State, argues Jyoti Punwani.
'The Sena can quickly reduce most solutions to violence.' 'When in power, it will revert to this gene which is coded into it and we will no doubt produce entertaining and frightening moments,' says Aakar Patel.
'It was a reaffirmation of his party's unrelenting defiance of its erstwhile ally, the BJP; an attempt to forge a new relationship with the community the Shiv Sena had always targeted; and a pointer towards the political imperative of taking everyone along if the fight against the ruling party had to succeed,' notes Jyoti Punwani.
The septuagenarian politician, once the right hand man of Bal Thackeray, is now battling irrelevance in a Balasaheb-less Shiv Sena
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