Shiv Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray (right) with his son Aaditya Thackeray in Mumbai, on January 10, 2025. The party’s unilateral decision to go solo in the Mumbai municipal election came as a shock to its alliance partners.
| Photo Credit: PTI
After its massive loss in the Maharashtra Assembly election in November 2024, the State’s opposition alliance Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) is falling apart—just before elections to local bodies, where the Mumbai municipal battle is particularly crucial. It looks like the process of disintegration has hastened after the recent Delhi Assembly election results.
MVA leaders, who expected to win big in the Assembly election after their triumph in the Lok Sabha election, won just 46 seats out of 288. For the first few weeks, MVA leaders were in complete denial; then came the reality check.
Seeing the futility in staying together, Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT) became the first party to signal moving on. The party announced it will contest the local bodies’ elections on its own, a decision taken without communication with the two other major alliance partners, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar), or NCP(SP).
BMC: Crucial battleground
Elections to 29 municipalities, 26 zilla parishads (district council), 257 municipal councils, and 289 panchayat samitis (taluka council) will likely take place at the end of this year. The Shiv Sena’s (UBT) unilateral decision to go solo came as a shock to its alliance partners and was criticised by them as well as by several civil society forums. So, a few days after the announcement, the Shiv Sena (UBT) declared that while the party will contest the Mumbai municipal election on its own, elections to other local bodies will be contested by the alliance.
The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM), better known as the BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation), is a crucial battleground in the local body elections. Asia’s richest local body, the BMC presented a Rs.74,247 crore budget for the financial year 2025-26. It is every party’s dream to rule Mumbai, which, being India’s financial capital, plays a critical role in State politics.
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Since 1995, the undivided Shiv Sena had been winning here. The Shiv Sena and the BJP were alliance partners until 2017, when both parties contested separately: the Shiv Sena won 84 seats and the BJP 82. The next election was supposed to be held in February 2022, but the pandemic struck and court cases around OBC reservations and ward delimitation put the election on hold. Today, the BMC Commissioner is the administrator because an elected body is not in place.
The Shiv Sena, formed in the city in 1966, has naturally been a Mumbai-centric party. The party, however, has seen several defections, most notably by Raj Thackeray, Narayan Rane, and Ganesh Naik. But the Shiv Sena never lost its hold over Mumbai: it won three out of four Lok Sabha seats it contested in 2024. In the Assembly, the Shiv Sena’s (UBT) strength is 20, out of which 10 MLAs are from the State capital.
Do-or-die battle for Shiv Sena (UBT)
After losing the Assembly election, the BMC battle is a do-or-die one for Uddhav Thackeray. The announcement that his party will go solo this election, therefore, has raised existential questions for the MVA. Ironically, when the AAP lost Delhi, the Shiv Sena (UBT) mouthpiece Saamana, in its editorial, criticised the Congress for not having allied with the AAP.
When asked if his party would reconsider its decision to go solo in the BMC, Shiv Sena (UBT) leader and Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Raut told Frontline: “The issue is about a respectable and working alliance. During the Assembly election, we saw how local Congress leaders behaved[in Maharashtra]. This is why we decided to go solo. But if Congress’ approach changes, we can think about an alliance.”
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Reacting to this criticism, Mumbai Congress chief and Lok Sabha MP Varsha Gaikwad said: “Let them [Shiv Sena UBT] first decide whether they want an alliance or not. They unilaterally declared that they would contest on their own [in BMC]. Now they are blaming the Congress for not forming an alliance in Delhi.” The Shiv Sena and the Congress have always fought against each other in elections: they only came together when Sharad Pawar took the initiative to form the MVA. Today, Eknath Shinde, Maharashtra’s Deputy Chief Minister, is Uddhav Thackeray’s bête noire.
The directionless MVA is united only on one agenda: questioning the Election Commission (EC). On February 6, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi addressed a press conference in New Delhi along with Sanjay Raut and NCP(SP) Lok Sabha MP Supriya Sule. He questioned the sudden surge in the electorate in Maharashtra between the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. He demanded the voter lists from both the elections from the EC. In the same media interaction, Raut also blamed the spike in the electorate for the MVA’s defeat in the Maharashtra Assembly election.
But notably, there has not been a single meeting held between MVA leaders after the disastrous Assembly election. The MVA, formed to keep the BJP at bay in Maharashtra, five years down the line, finds its future hanging in the balance as the BJP revels in its new-found power in the State.
Source:https://frontline.thehindu.com/politics/maharashtra-local-body-elections-defections-mva-shiv-sena-ubt-congress-ncp-sp-mumbai-bmc-polls/article69214959.ece