BJP on top after civic poll victories

The ruling BJP-led Mahayuti has asserted its dominance in Maharashtra with an emphatic victory over the Opposition in last week’s civic elections. The BJP is the largest party in the state now and is in a commanding position across all regions. The party and its allies, the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), have won 26 of the state’s  29 municipal corporations. The BJP is the largest party in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, the country’s richest municipal corporation (BMC). It is set to have a BJP mayor, marking an end to three decades of Shiv Sena rule. The BJP will also control most of the state’s important corporations, such as Pune, Nagpur and Nashik. The party’s dominance is a continuation of the dominance it established in the 2024 Assembly elections and the civic elections held last year. 

The results show that the BJP’s slogan of triple engine growth has appealed to urban Maharashtra. The credit goes to the party rather than the alliance. There was competition between constituents of the alliance. The Ajit Pawar-led NCP joined hands with the Sharad Pawar-led faction of the party, but the alliance as a whole was not weakened by such dissensions. The Mahayuti is not an ideologically coherent alliance, but it is a platform on which parties came together to share power. It has now proved that it can retain power and extend it to all levels of the administration. The BJP, which was once the Shiv Sena’s minor partner, is now the anchor of the alliance, and holds the position the Congress once enjoyed in the state. It was through clever political management, which included splitting and weakening the Opposition, that it established itself as the state’s No 1 party, and it does not seem to have any challenge in the near future. 

If Eknath Shinde’s rebellion weakened the Thackeray legacy in Maharashtra, the loss of the BMC has dealt a decisive blow against it. The coming together of the Thackeray cousins Uddhav Thackeray and Raj Thackeray could not salvage it, and their campaign based on the narrow ‘Marathi manoos’ plank failed to make an impact. That is a sign that cosmopolitan Mumbai has rejected the exclusivist and nativist pitch once championed by the Shiv Sena. The desperate alliance between the NCP factions did not make an impact even in their strongholds. The Congress has been reduced to insignificance in most parts of the country’s most urbanised state. The fact that the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) of the Congress, the Shiv Sena UBT and the NCP-SP could not present a respectable fight shows how one-sided the state’s politics has become.