BMC election results highlight how political reunions reshaped Mumbai’s civic power balance |
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation polls, or BMC polls, attracted national attention this week because of the municipal body being so rich and the personalities fighting the elections being so flamboyant. The results are out, and the big story is that, for the first time, the Bharatiya Janata Party will install its mayor in Asia’s richest municipal corporation. However, what is not being talked about is why all this happened and what this will lead to.
BJP’s measured success in Mumbai
One must make it clear that these polls, pan-Maharashtra, have gone totally in favour of the BJP, but in Mumbai the fight has been tough for the saffron party. In other words, what has happened in Mumbai city cannot be called a “clean sweep” by the BJP, and the party perhaps did not expect that kind of sweep but just focused on getting a clear majority and establishing its mayor and control on the standing committee of the BMC. The party has clearly succeeded in achieving these goals.
It would be interesting to see what worked for the BJP and what went wrong for the Thackeray cousins, whose much-hyped reunion has just about worked to save them from total debacle in the municipal body, which is their last bastion in political terms.
MVA’s decline from Lok Sabha to civic polls
It is clear that the Maha Vikas Aghadi, or MVA, the alliance of Uddhav Thackeray, the Congress party and Sharad Pawar’s NCP, worked very well in the Lok Sabha polls of 2024. However, the same alliance could not deliver good results in the Assembly polls six months later. In the Assembly polls, the leaders looked overconfident; they had no coordination and kept fighting among themselves till the last moment. Just over a year later, the MVA simply disintegrated.
Congress-Uddhav break and minority vote split
It is obvious that the Congress–Uddhav alliance, which worked so well in the Lok Sabha polls, was missing in the BMC polls. The Congress walked away from Uddhav because he aligned with his estranged cousin Raj Thackeray and his Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, or MNS.
The MNS has had a past of attacking migrants and verbally targeting the minority community over various issues. The Congress sensed that it would lose votes of North Indians, Muslims and other minorities if it took Raj Thackeray along in the MVA. Results show that the Congress party’s fears came true.
The minority community in Mumbai, which constitutes 18 per cent of the votes, got split between Uddhav, the Congress and the Samajwadi Party, as there was confusion about how they could vote for Raj Thackeray’s MNS.
Non-Marathi consolidation benefits BJP
Another factor that damaged Uddhav Thackeray’s party was that North Indian voters and South Indians, such as Tamilians, Telugus and other linguistic communities, got galvanised and backed the BJP, as the saffron party exhorted them to unite under the “umbrella of Hindutva”. So clearly, the reunion of the Thackeray cousins, instead of working as a force multiplier for the Thackerays, in fact ended up damaging them.
Pawar reunion falters in Pune region
Looking at the Pawar uncle and nephew, a similar thing seems to have happened in the Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporations (PCMC). In the last two years, both parties fought against each other, and this time party activists as well as voters were confused about how they could suddenly join hands and how Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar, who is part of the BJP-led Mahayuti alliance government in Maharashtra, could target the BJP in almost every election rally in Pune and PCMC.
This put many activists in a dilemma, and many crossed over to either the BJP or even to the Congress party. The NCP (SP) Pune city president, Prashant Jagtap, former mayor of Pune, resigned from the NCP overnight and joined the Congress party. He won from his constituency, which indicates that voters in many parts of Pune rejected the Pawar family’s policy of flip-flop and double-speak.
Multiple factors, but one key takeaway
Many factors worked in these municipal polls: there were widespread defections from some parties towards the BJP; there were allegations of large-scale distribution of money in the last few days before voting; there were factors like cash benefit transfers and other government schemes that were promoted heavily in the media; and there was pressure in many constituencies on rivals from the opposition to withdraw from the contest, which resulted in 66 candidates getting elected unopposed even before the elections happened.
But the biggest factor in Mumbai — the most-watched polls — for the Thackerays was that their reunion went wrong. Raj Thackeray joining hands with Uddhav clearly resulted in damaging Uddhav rather than benefiting him, and a similar thing happened in the case of Sharad Pawar and Ajit Pawar in the Pune district.
Rohit Chandavarkar is a senior journalist who has worked for 31 years with various leading newspaper brands and television channels in Mumbai and Pune.
