Mumbai, Jan 15 (IANS) Voting for elections to 29 civic bodies, including the high-profile Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), is being held on Thursday across Maharashtra under tight security arrangements.
As the state goes to the polls, attention is centred on Mumbai, where the BJP-led MahaYuti is engaged in a closely fought contest with the reunited Thackeray cousins, Raj and Uddhav, for control of the country’s richest civic body.
Polling will be held for a total of 2,869 seats across 893 wards. As many as 3.48 crore voters are eligible to decide the political future of 15,931 candidates in these civic elections.
In the BMC alone, which has an annual budget of more than Rs 74,400 crore, nearly 1,700 candidates are in the fray for 227 seats in polls being conducted after a delay of four years.
The counting of votes for all 29 municipal corporations will be taken up on January 16. The civic polls are being held after a gap of more than six years, as the terms of these local bodies expired between 2020 and 2023 following a series of legal and administrative hurdles.
Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis spearheaded the ruling alliance’s campaign, touring various parts of the state to seek support for MahaYuti candidates, which include the BJP and the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena.
These elections also mark the first BMC polls since the Shiv Sena split in 2022, when Shinde broke away with the backing of a majority of the party’s MLAs. The undivided Shiv Sena had controlled the BMC for 25 years, from 1997 to 2022.
The contest for Mumbai’s mayoral post emerged as a major flashpoint during the campaign.
The BJP claimed that a victory for the Shiv Sena (UBT) could lead to a Muslim mayor, an allegation that was strongly rebutted by Uddhav Thackeray’s party, which assured voters that Mumbai would have a Marathi mayor. Fadnavis, too, asserted that the next mayor would be Hindu and Marathi.
In Mumbai, the BJP is contesting 137 seats, while the Shiv Sena is fighting 90 seats, and the NCP has entered the fray separately in 94 seats. The Shiv Sena UBT has fielded 163 candidates, the MNS 52, the Congress 143 and the VBA 46 candidates.
Congress has put up a total of 1,263 candidates across the rest of Maharashtra.
To ensure the smooth conduct of polling and counting for the BMC elections, more than 25,000 police personnel have been deployed across Mumbai.
In a notable political development ahead of the polls, estranged cousins Uddhav and Raj Thackeray came together after nearly two decades in an effort to consolidate Marathi votes.
At the same time, rival factions of the NCP forged a local understanding in Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad.
–IANS
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