The Chandrapur seat has fallen vacant due to the sudden demise of Suresh alias Balu Dhanorkar, the lone Congress MP from Maharashtra. Now there is hue and cry among the party leaders regarding who will be the candidate from Congress in the Chandrapur by-election. Maharashtra Congress president Nana Patole wants to field late Dhanorkar’s MLA wife Pratibha from here, while another section of party leaders is in favor of giving ticket to former Chandrapur MP and trade union leader Naresh Puglia. The then Shiv Sena MLA Dhanorkar had ‘joined’ the Congress a day before the nomination for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. He was a big ‘liquor businessman and had no shortage of money’, perhaps that is why at that time he had got veteran leaders like Mukul Wasnik and Vijay Vaditwar to his side and it was these leaders who then stopped Puglia from rebelling. In 2019, under the alliance, the Chandrapur seat had gone to the BJP from the Shiv Sena quota, due to which Balu had to leave the Shiv Sena in a hurry and join the Congress. On the other hand, Naresh Puglia, a strong contender for this seat, is one of Rahul Gandhi’s special confidantes. Remember, when Rahul Gandhi went to Vidarbha to meet Lilavati and Kalavati at their house, it was Puglia who helped both of them financially at the behest of Rahul. When a Vidarbha farmer who had invented a revolutionary seed committed suicide, it was on Rahul’s advice that Puglia got his son employed in the ‘Ballarpur Paper Mill’. A section of the party here is protesting against giving ticket to late Dhanorkar’s wife Pratibha, saying that the party should learn a lesson from the Jalandhar bypoll where late Congress MP’s wife Kamaljit Kaur was defeated and after 24 years Congress lost its traditional seat of Jalandhar to AAP.