BJP-Shiv Sena alliance wins Mumbai civic body by bagging 118 seats; Uddhav Thackeray's party gets 65

Mumbai, Jan 16 (PTI) Breaching the bastion of the Thackeray family, the alliance of the BJP and Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena on Friday secured a clear majority in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) elections by bagging 118 out of 227 seats.

The BJP won 89 seats, while the Shinde-led Sena secured 29. The alliance thus crossed the halfway mark of 114 needed to control the country's richest civic body.

The Shiv Sena (UBT)-MNS-NCP (SP) alliance managed to win 72 seats. The undivided Shiv Sena had ruled the civic body for 25 years since 1997.

The Shiv Sena (UBT) led by Uddhav Thackeray won 65 seats. Raj Thackeray's Maharashtra Navnirman Sena won six seats, while the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar faction) got only one seat.

Among other parties, the Congress won 24 seats, AIMIM eight, Ajit Pawar-led NCP three, and the Samajwadi Party two. Two independent candidates also won in the high-stakes elections, held after a nine-year gap.

In the previous BMC elections of 2017, the undivided Shiv Sena had emerged as the largest party with 84 seats, followed closely by the BJP with 82 seats, while the Congress won 21 seats, NCP nine, MNS seven, Samajwadi Party six, AIMIM two, Akhil Bharatiya Sena one, and others five. The BJP and Shiv Sena had contested the election separately then.

This time the counting process which started at 10 am was delayed due to various reasons including faulty EVMs, demands of recount and also the phase-wise counting process (which the civic body adopted for the first time).

Bhushan Gagrani, municipal commissioner and district election officer, said a Printing Auxiliary Display Unit (PADU), which is a replica of EVM's control unit, was used during the counting process in a ward in the suburban Ghatkopar area.

A number of heavyweight corporators lost in their strongholds.

Among those who tasted defeat were former Shiv Sena MLA Sada Sarvankar's son Samadhan and daughter Priya, and former BEST committee chairman Anil Kokil who had defected to the Shiv Sena from Shiv Sena (UBT) after being denied a ticket from Lalbaug.

Senior BJP candidates Ravi Raja, Vinod Mishra, Priti Patankar and Rajul Sameer Desai faced defeat along with former Congress corporator Sheetal Mhatre, Shiv Sena's Dipti Vaykar Potnis, NCP's Captain Malik.

Former mayors and Shiv Sena (UBT) candidates Kishori Pednekar, Vishakha Raut, Shraddha Jadhav and Milind Vaidya won from their respective wards, along with former deputy mayor Hemangi Worlikar and Suhas Wadkar.

BJP's Makarand Narwekar, one of Mumbai's richest candidates with assets of Rs 124 crore, won from a ward in Colaba in south Mumbai. He is the brother of Maharashtra Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar. Rahul Narwekar's sister-in-law Harshita and cousin Gauravi Shivalkar-Narwekar also won from wards 225 and 227, respectively.

Ward 227 in Colaba, incidentally, recorded the lowest voter turnout at 20.88 per cent, compared to the citywide average of 52.94 per cent across all 227 wards in Mumbai.

New faces among the winning candidates included BJP spokesperson Navnath Ban, Shiv Sena (UBT) MLA Sunil Shinde's brother Nishikant Shinde, MLA and former mayor Sunil Prabhu's son Ankit Prabhu and Shiv Sena (UBT) candidate Kiran Tawade.

Shiv Sena (UBT)'s Ramakant Rahate and Shailendra Phanase, and BJP's Rakhi Jadhav registered a fourth consecutive victory.

Tejasvi Ghosalkar, Jitendra Patel, Bala Tawde, Preeti Satam, Sonam Jamsutkar, Yogita Koli, Jagruti Patil and Archana Bhalerao secured second terms.

Former Shiv Sena MP Rahul Shewale's sister-in-law Vaishali faced defeat from Dharavi.

In a keenly watched contest, Congress candidate Tulip Miranda won from ward number 90 in Santacruz by a thin margin of just seven votes after securing 5,197 votes against BJP's Jyoti Upadhyay who polled 5,190 votes.

BJP's Yogita Sunil Koli scored a landslide victory in ward number 46 in Malad West, garnering 37,831 votes and defeating her nearest rival Snehita Sandesh Dehalikar of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) by a massive margin of 21,717 votes.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, one of Asia's wealthiest municipal bodies, has an annual budget of over Rs 74,400 crore.

The previous BMC polls were held in 2017, and the term of the elected body ended in March 2022. Since then, BMC commissioners have been handling the day-to-day functioning of the civic body as state-appointed administrators. PTI KK KRK