Matoshree loses sheen, Thackerays’ writ falls flat
MUMBAI: On Friday, when Bengaluru Central MP P C Mohan posted on X “Ordered some rasmalai. #BMCResults”, it was a sweet dig at the firebrand Mumbai leader Raj Thackeray in the fight for civic polls in Maharashtra that had turned bitter and personal between Raj and Tamil Nadu BJP leader K Annamalai. Raj had ridiculed Annamalai by addressing him with consonance “rasmalai”.
Raj must have waited for the Friday counting of the state-wide corporation results with anticipation of engineering another of his umpteenth attempts at political revival. However, the day turned out to be one of his many disappointments. At the time of going to the press, his Maharashtra Navnirman Sena had scored a paltry 17 victories and leads in 2,869 wards in Maharashtra. Nine of these results are from Mumbai, where he managed to convince cousin Uddhav to drop the Congress for an alliance with him and contest on the parochial principle of Marathi manoos.
Mumbai was always central to everything that the Thackeray cousins stood for. Whenever the Shiv Sena made a serious bid at state leadership, Mumbai was the launch pad. Right from the days of Bal Thackeray, or even before that, when the senior Thackeray’s father Prabodhankar Thackeray became a big leader of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement, which sought a separate state for Marathi-speaking people, it was always about Bombay or Mumbai.
The BJP of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani couldn’t imagine a future in the city, or the state, without an alliance with the Sena.
However, the BJP is finally warming up to the idea of having its own mayor in the city, even as Uddhav is nowhere close to being a spent force. His is not the single largest party in the BMC anymore. With 67 corporators—at the time of going to press—his is the second largest, just 20 behind the BJP in the 227-member house. His appeal among the city’s Marathi voters stays intact, but his grip over the city’s power structures seems to have loosened to the point of no return, since the opponent is a new BJP under Devendra Fadnavis.
The Thackeray legacy is in a crisis of mortality now, since Uddhav has tried everything from the left to the right, from the Marathi pride to the Hindu pride, from the family appeal to the city appeal. With cousin Raj reduced to dust, Uddhav stands alone, abandoned by ideology, rejected by Realpolitik, & ignored by money power.
174 - The no. of corporators Shiv Sena (UBT) & MNS could manage out of 2,869 in state
Pawars’ power play fails to make any impact even at turf
The results of civic body elections in Maharashtra have come as a big blow to seasoned state stalwart Sharad Pawar and his nephew Ajit Pawar, who were planning to merge their respective factions of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and emerge as a consolidated force against the dominance of the BJP. However, they have lost Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad corporations, which were known as bastions of the Pawars, badly to the BJP.
The Pawars decided to test the waters for the merger with the alliance in these civic polls. However, the results are not encouraging for them. In Pune, the BJP secured a landslide victory with 123 seats out of 165, while the Ajit Pawar’s NCP won only 21 seats, while the Sharad Pawar-led faction won merely three seats. The Congress, the ally of the Sharad Pawar faction in the state and national elections, performed much better by securing 16 seats. In the Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation election also, the NCP lost badly, where the BJP secured 86 seats, while Ajit Pawar’s NCP got 37 and his uncle drew a zero.
The twin defeats signal a big jolt to the dynastic politics of the Pawars, which was replicated throughout the state. In the prestigious battle of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, Ajit Pawar could get only two corporators elected, while Sharad Pawar could manage only one.
In hindsight, the Pawar family coming together for the civic polls seems to be a mistake, through which both the uncle and the nephew have lost their bargaining power. While Sharad Pawar stands to lose his hold in the INDIA bloc, whenever he seeks to revive it for any future elections, the nephew stands to lose immediately. It can be expected that in the coming days, state Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis will also start giving less importance to Ajit Pawar and continue to expand his party base in the NCP bastion, even if it antagonises Ajit Pawar.
During the campaign, Ajit Pawar had tried to outsmart the BJP by making several freebies to voters, such as free bus and metro services, but the voters of Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad did not buy the promises. What this means is that if he tries to go with the BJP for the 2029 state polls, the BJP will definitely drive a hard bargain.
On the other hand, Sharad’s move has jeopardised the future of his daughter Supriya Sule, who is a Lok Sabha MP, who may find it difficult to revive the party at the grassroots on her own, or even with the help of the power of her cousin Ajit.
200 - The number of corporators the two Pawar parties could secure in state