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Former MLA Harshwardhan Sapkal, the new Maharashtra Congress president, is faced with the onerous task of reviving the party in the state where it faced a crushing defeat in the last year's assembly polls.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Thursday appointed Sapkal, 56, as the new chief of the party's Maharashtra unit, replacing Nana Patole, who was holding the post since 2021.
'The Congress president has appointed Harshwardhan Sapkal as the president of the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) with immediate effect. The party appreciates the contributions of the outgoing president Nana Patole,' a statement from All India Congress Committee general secretary (Organisation) K C Venugopal said in New Delhi.
Sapkal represented the Buldhana assembly seat in Maharashtra's Vidarbha region from 2014 to 2019 and was a senior party observer for Odisha assembly and Lok Sabha elections last year.
Patole, who won with just 208 votes from the Sakoli assembly seat in Bhandara district last year, also hails from Vidarbha.
Former legislator Sapkal, considered a grassroots politician, served as a national secretary of the AICC and joint in-charge of states of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Punjab for 10 years.
He is currently president of the Rajiv Gandhi Panchayat Raj Cell of the party.
Kharge also approved the appointment of senior MLA Vijay Namdevrao Wadettiwar as the leader of the Congress Legislative Party in Maharashtra with immediate effect.
The Congress, part of the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), put up a good show in the Lok Sabha polls in Maharashtra where it won 13 of the 48 seats -- the only party in the state to touch the double-digit mark.
This was a vast improvement from just one Lok Sabha seat the grand old party won in 2019 in Maharashtra, where it was a dominant political force and ruling party for decades before erosion in its support base started.
Just 6 months after the Lok Sabha polls, the Congress suffered its worst defeat in assembly elections in Maharashtra.
The party won just 16 seats in the November 2024 assembly polls, its lowest-every tally and a steep decline from 44 in 2019.
The Congress contested around 100 seats as part of a pre-poll alliance with the Nationalist Congress Party-Sharadchandra Pawar and the Shiv Sena-Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray, all constituents of the MVA, in the 288-member house.
The MVA together won 46 seats, while the BJP-led Mahayuti alliance swept the polls winning in 230 constituencies.
Sapkal's task will be to rebuild the Congress in its erstwhile stronghold and prepare it for the next electoral challenge -- local body polls in Maharashtra, including civic bodies of big cities like Mumbai, Pune, Thane and Nagpur.
The new Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee president will also have to coordinate with MVA allies Shiv Sena-UBT and the NCP-SP to strength the opposition and mount a challenge to the formidable ruling bloc which consists of the BJP, Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and Ajit Pawar's NCP.