The 63-year-old had defeated union minister Nitin Gadkari in student’s council elections for Nagpur university in 1977. “It was one of the first elections after the loss of Indira Gandhi in elections post Emergency. Nitin Gadkari was the ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad) candidate for the post of General Secretary of Nagpur University Student’s Council and I was the NSUI candidate and I managed to defeat Mr. Gadkari,” Avinash Pande recalls with a chuckle. He was not inclined towards joining politics full time. But it was a popular Congress leader from Vidarbha, Shrikant Jichkar, who persuaded him to change his mind. Jichkar, who had cracked the UPSC and had been selected for Class A services, had impressive academic credentials but had opted for politics and became an MLA. His promising career was cut short when he died tragically young. But for Avinash Pande, it was a turning point. At the age of 25 he was fielded to contest the election for the East Nagpur Assembly constituency. Surviving multiple attacks during the campaign, when petrol and torches were flung at him, he won the election convincingly. He was denied a ticket in the next election, he suspects, because he fell foul of a powerful satrap in the state. The same leader, he alleges, ensured his defeat in 2006 in the election to fill up the Rajya Sabha seat fallen vacant following the demise of Pramod Mahajan. But he secured 19 more votes than the strength of the party in the assembly, he recalls. From being one of the youngest MLAs in Maharashtra assembly in 1985 to Rajya Sabha MP in 2010 and from being the NSUI Maharashtra president in 1981 to AICC General Secretary in 2018, Pande has been a Congressman over the past four decades. One of his sweetest and most satisfying moments came when he helped the party to win the Rajasthan Assembly election in 2018 against heavy odds. He was in-charge of the state in the AICC and set up a war room in Jaipur, roped in younger workers from Maharashtra and launched a ‘Sampark and Samvad’ campaign a year before the polling to reach out to Congress workers.
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