At an event in a Solapur college, Praniti Shinde, 28, makes a fervent appeal: “I’m one of you.”

Few believe it — there’s a distinct South Mumbai twang to her well-practised line in Marathi — but there’s loud applause for the daughter of veteran Solapur Congress leader, the state’s first Dalit Chief Minister and now Union Minister Sushilkumar Shinde.

“There was never any clash between my city education and my life here in Solapur. We were brought up like that, with a dual life,” says the candidate who went to Bombay Scottish High School and did her BA from St Xavier’s College, Mumbai. “We visited often, almost once a month.”

She has been running an NGO, Jai Jui, in Solapur for five years now, offering employment-generation schemes and even a data-entry and digitisation BPO for unemployed, educated youth.

Also a law graduate from Government Law College, Churchgate, Shinde has done her homework about Solapur and its issues but that she’s new to the cut and thrust of politics is clear. Ask her about reservations and she says, “To an extent, based solely on economic criteria, for a couple of years, I think it’s okay.”

You can’t ignore caste in a semi-urban area where society is still divided along those lines and “some castes are still developing,” she adds.

Her father was a police sub-inspector who quit his job to become a politician. Elected five times from Solapur, he contested and was elected even from an unreserved constituency. He is expected to campaign for her in the last lap, as is Bollywood star Salman Khan.

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