Mumbai Goes To Polls, Sena Guns For Pawar

MUMBAI: A huge cast of 3.36 crore voters will take poll position in the second and final part of the state’s political opera on Monday.
At stake are fortunes of heavyweights like Sharad Pawar and Gurudas Kamat, Union ministers Ram Naik and Jayawantiben Mehta as well as first-timers like film-star Govinda.
In the city’s six seats, most contests are straight, two-way fights between old-guard incumbents and young hopefuls, except in the mill-to-mall constituency of Mumbai south-central.
Here, the Sena-NCP contest between MP Mohan Rawle and Sachin Ahir has seen the entrance of underworld don Arun Gawli and retired bureaucrat T K Chowdhary with a view to upsetting some equations.
Jayawantiben Mehta, the only woman candidate in the metropolis, takes on debutant Milind Deora—an opponent she referred to as her son— in south Mumbai.
And film-star Govinda has been making waves against petroleum minister Ram Naik in Mumbai north. Of the 24 LS seats on offer, nine are in western Maharashtra, the sugarbelt stronghold of NCP, where Sena leaders have been making frontal attacks on Pawar in order to break the Maratha strongman’s grip in the area.
In the coastal Konkan region (three seats) as well as Thane, Jalna, Aurangabad, Nashik, Malegaon, Dahanu, the NCP has been trying to break the saffron hold.