Narayan Rane slams media for playing up ‘minor’ defeat

State industries minister Narayan Rane on Tuesday blasted the media for turning his ‘minor’ defeat in the municipal council elections into a ‘major’ news event, which, he said, was disproportionate to what had happened.

“I lost five seats in Vengurla (in Sindhudurg district), but the way the media portrayed it was as if I had lost a Lok Sabha seat,” he said, addressing a press conference at the Vidhan Bhavan in Nagpur.

He said other parties had lost much more, but the way TV channels debated only his supporters’ defeat to the exclusion of all the others was ridiculous. “Actually, I am grateful that the only person the media thought noteworthy of speaking or writing about was me,” he said sarcastically.

Rane said he accepted the decision of the people and would ponder over it. “I am in politics because of the people of Konkan, and I will leave politics if the people of Konkan tell me to do so, not because some journalists decide that I should,” he said.
He said that Sindhudurg district, his home district, had the least amount of crime in all of Maharashtra, so blaming criminal incidents in the district for his supporters’ defeat was wrong.

He was referring to the street fights between his supporters and those of Bhaskar Jadhav of the Nationalist Congress Party, which resulted in people panicking and staying indoors.

Rane said this was a stray incident, and insisted that his son Nitesh was not involved.