Kolhapur: Ten MLAs, two state cabinet ministers and two MPs campaigned against him. Satej Patil still won.
The Congress legislator, better known as Bunty Patil, led his panel to 13 of the 25 seats in the election to the Kolhapur District Cooperative Milk Producers Union — Gokul, the largest milk union in Maharashtra — giving him a clear majority on Monday (19 October). Before counting, the BJP had said it would take all 25. The counting-day result was delayed by hours; Patil emerged on top.
The union matters well beyond Kolhapur. Gokul's turnover in 2024-25 was ₹3,966.28 crore, and it is tied to nearly 4.41 lakh milk producers in and around the district. Founded as a cooperative dairy project on 16 March 1963, it has long been a prize in state cooperative politics.
Patil, the party's Kolhapur district chief and an MLC, took on all three ruling parties — the BJP, the Shiv Sena and the NCP. He is the son of the late education baron D Y Patil, after whom Navi Mumbai's cricket stadium is named.
This is not his first Gokul win. In 2021, with the Maha Vikas Aghadi in power and before it split, he and Hasan Mushrif of the undivided NCP took control of the union, ending 30 years of dominance by former MLA Mahadevrao Mahadik and the late former MLA P N Patil. The two promised to run Gokul only for dairy farmers. Within a year, the Shiv Sena and NCP splits changed the state's arithmetic. Mushrif moved toward the BJP; he publicly affirmed his cooperative-sector ties with Patil, then dropped that stand under pressure from the BJP.
Patil's legislative record runs back two decades. He won Karveer in 2004 as an Independent, Kolhapur South for the Congress five years later, and in November 2010 became Minister of State for Home under then chief minister Prithviraj Chavan. He lost Kolhapur South in 2014, a defeat that soured ties with the Mahadik family of Kolhapur, and returned as an MoS after the MVA came to power in 2019.
The result lands in a Congress still recovering from its 2024 Assembly rout, months after doing well in the parliamentary polls. Party insiders say his negotiating and election-planning skills are what the state unit needs now.
"My next target is to help the MVA win two legislative council seats that will go to polls on October 23," Patil said after the win.