Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) chief Prakash Ambedkar was admitted to a hospital in Pune on Thursday morning with chest pain, the party said in a post on its official X (formerly Twitter) handle.
"Due to chest pain, Prakash Ambedkar was admitted to a hospital in Pune on Thursday morning. He is undergoing treatment in the ICU due to a blood clot in his heart. Currently, his condition is stable. However, an angiography will be done," read the post.
"The Ambedkar family has requested that no one should interrupt with questions. The family's request for privacy should be respected. The VBA chief will be under doctors' observation for the next three to five days," it added.
"The party's state president Rekha Thakur will be leading the campaign for the elections for the next few days with the help of the Election Coordination Committee, Manifesto Committee and Media and Research Department," it further said.
Prakash Ambedkar is the grandson of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Constitution of India. He is a two-time Lok Sabha MP from Akola and a one-term Rajya Sabha member.
In the lead-up to the elections, the VBA has released several lists of candidates for the 288 seats in Maharashtra. It hasn't joined any alliance in the state so far. Ambedkar said that the party has named candidates from different social communities, which have been socially and politically excluded by the mainstream parties and their successive governments.
"Staying true to our sacred ideology, we have given representation to the deprived, Bahujan groups to gain true representation and political power, breaking the hegemony of families of certain castes," Ambedkar added.
Recently, Ambedkar targeted NCP (SP) chief Sharad Pawar and claimed that the senior politician had met underworld don Dawood Ibrahim in Dubai while he was Maharashtra's chief minister.
Talking to reporters, Ambedkar claimed the meeting took place between 1988 and 1991. He claimed that when Pawar was the CM, he first went to London and then to California for a meeting. "He came back to London and then went to Dubai. He met Dawood Ibrahim in Dubai," he said, wondering if the central government had sanctioned the meeting.
