MUMBAI: In the 52 electoral wards in the city which witnessed a direct battle between Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena and the Shiv Sena (UBT)-MNS combine, the Thackeray cousins won 36 and Shinde’s Sena only 16.
However, in several places, Uddhav and Raj’s candidates just about scraped through, with the Dy CM’s party coming very close and indicating it had begun to make inroads into Thackerays’ traditional strongholds.
In ward 121 in the eastern suburbs, UBT Sena’s Priyadarshini Nagesh Thakare won by 14 votes; another, again in the eastern suburbs (no. 128), was won by MNS’ Sai Shirke by 158 votes, and ex-mayor Vishakha Raut got elected in Dadar by a margin of 197 votes.
Of the 36 wins for the Thackeray cousins in direct fights with Eknath Shinde’s Sena, five came with margins of under 1,000. Shinde’s candidates chased hard, especially in pockets where the Thackeray network had once been unshakeable.
In these contests, while the UBT-MNS alliance was fighting to ensure that their old citadels remained with it, the Shinde-led Sena was contesting in an alliance with the BJP. Of the total 227 seats in BMC, the Shinde Sena contested 90 in all.
In central Mumbai’s Marathi heartland and in parts of the eastern suburbs, the UBT-MNS camp celebrated, but without the swagger of earlier years. They could feel the pressure, the way Shinde’s presence began to press into familiar lanes.
Farther north, in the administrative wards RNorth, R-Central, and R-South covering Dahisar, Borivli and Kandivali, the contest tilted. This stretch is in the Mumbai North parliamentary constituency, where BJP’s influence is considerable. Here, Shinde’s Sena took five seats in the Senaversus-Senas contests, while the UBT-MNS alliance managed only one.
These victories were not all landslides, but they were convincing: in 15 of Shinde’s 16 wins against the Thackerays, the margin was more than 1,000 votes. Only one seat came close, which was won by just 569.
Of the 52 Sena vs Senas seats, 42 had been won by the undivided Shiv Sena in the 2017 BMC elections, one had been won by the MNS, and the rest by independents, NCP and Congress.
The BJP had then fought many of these seats independently against the Sena, excluding in six Sena stronghold areas, and secured the second or third highest number of votes in these seats in 2017.
After the split in the Sena and shifting of corporators from one camp to another, UBT Sena used those numbers to its advantage. For instance, in ward no. 62, an independent, Multani Changej Jamal, had won the election in 2017, while the Shiv Sena was in second position.
After the Sena split, the UBT Sena roped him in, and his kin won the seat for the party and also ensured the defeat of party rebel Raju Pednekar.
Once a Thackeray loyalist, Pednekar had wanted an assembly ticket from the party in the last elections but was not given a nomination, after which he contested as an independent and later joined Shinde Sena.