Everwhere she goes, Pankaja Munde is being told that the Parli Assembly constituency is hers for certain. After all, not only is her father, Member of Parliament Gopinath Munde, a native of Parli, but he also won the Beed Lok Sabha seat polling a massive 5,53,000-odd votes this year. But the 30-year-old who last fought an election while in college in Mumbai apparently does not want to take it for granted.

“I don’t want to appear overconfident,” she says, amid a gruelling round of campaigning, walking through slushy roads in villages, making speech after speech to groups of villagers, mostly farmers’ families belonging to the Banjara community that the Mundes belong to.

“I don’t understand caste politics,” she says, quite simply. She is all for affirmative action — “you’d give a malnourished child more attention than a healthy child” — but believes there are enough local issues to address without having to seek votes based on caste or community.

She appeals to the women in the villages where she is conducting an 8 am to 8 pm campaign every day, having covered 80 of the 168 villages in her constituency. “Rural women vote on emotional issues, things that they connect with, not state or central-level plans or schemes.” She talks of price rise, crop insurance, repeatedly underlines that she spent 17 years through school and college in Parli, and, therefore, understands local concerns.

But more than anything else, she invokes the support her father commands here. “It will be a vote for Mundeji,” she says at every village meeting. “You gave him a big Lok Sabha victory four months ago. I hope you will come out to vote for him once again.”

... contd.