Mumbai: As Maharashtra heads to the elections on Thursday for 29 municipal corporations, the spotlight is firmly on Mumbai, where the BJP-led Mahayuti is locked in a keen battle with the united Thackeray cousins Raj and Uddhav for control of the cash-rich BMC.
Polling for the 2,869 seats spread across 893 wards will begin at 7.30 am and end at 5.30 pm. A total of 3.48 crore voters are eligible to decide the fate of 15,931 candidates. In the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), whose annual Budget is over Rs 74, 400 crore, 1,700 candidates are vying for 227 seats in elections being held after a four-year delay.
Except for Mumbai, the other urban bodies have multi-member wards. Vote count will take place on January 16.
The polls, being held after a gap of several years due to various legal and administrative delays, are being seen as a “mini-Assembly” battle that will test the ground strength of the split factions of the Shiv Sena and the NCP, as well as the electoral prowess of the ruling Mahayuti and the Congress.
Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who spearheaded the campaign for BJP-led Mahayuti, has predicted that MNS leader Raj Thackeray would emerge as the biggest loser in his alliance with cousin and Shiv Sena (UBT) president Uddhav.
He dismissed the coming together of rival NCP factions in Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad as merely a localised development.
The CM led the ruling alliance’s canvassing, traversing the state to campaign for candidates of the Mahayuti, which includes his party BJP and the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena.
These are the first BMC polls since the 2022 split in the Shiv Sena when Eknath Shinde broke away with a majority of the party’s MLAs. The undivided Shiv Sena held sway over India’s richest civic body for 25 years (1997-2022).
More than 25,000 police personnel will be deployed across Mumbai to oversee elections to the BMC and vote counting.
In a significant political turn ahead of the elections, estranged cousins Uddhav and Raj Thackeray reunited after two decades in their bid to consolidate Marathi votes even as rival NCP factions forged a local alliance in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad.
The Congress has asserted its presence in Mumbai by stepping out of the shadow of its Maha Vikas Aghadi allies - Shiv Sena (UBT) and NCP (SP). The Congress has joined hands with Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) and the Rashtriya Samaj Paksh in the state capital, even as it contests independently in Nagpur.