BJP–Shiv Sena alliance wins BMC with 118 seats, Uddhav Thackeray’s party gets 65
Congress won 24 seats, AIMIM eight, the Ajit Pawar-led NCP three, and the Samajwadi Party two.
Congress won 24 seats, AIMIM eight, the Ajit Pawar-led NCP three, and the Samajwadi Party two.
Congress won 24 seats, AIMIM eight, the Ajit Pawar-led NCP three, and the Samajwadi Party two.
Mumbai: Breaking the long-standing dominance of the Thackeray family, the alliance of the BJP and the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena on Friday secured a clear majority in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) by winning 118 of the 227 seats.
The BJP emerged with 89 seats, while the Shinde faction of the Shiv Sena secured 29, taking the alliance past the majority mark of 114 required to control the country’s richest civic body.
The Shiv Sena (UBT)–MNS–NCP (SP) alliance secured 72 seats. The undivided Shiv Sena had governed the civic body continuously for 25 years since 1997.
Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT) won 65 seats, Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena secured six, and the Sharad Pawar faction of the Nationalist Congress Party won one.
Among other parties, the Congress won 24 seats, AIMIM eight, the Ajit Pawar-led NCP three, and the Samajwadi Party two. Two independent candidates were also elected in the high-profile polls, which were held after a nine-year gap.
In the 2017 elections, the undivided Shiv Sena emerged as the single-largest party with 84 seats, followed by the BJP with 82, while the Congress won 21, NCP nine, MNS seven, the Samajwadi Party six, AIMIM two, Akhil Bharatiya Sena one, and others five. At that time, the BJP and Shiv Sena had contested separately.
This time, counting, which began at 10 am, faced delays due to malfunctioning EVMs, demands for recounts, and the civic body's phase-wise counting system adopted for the first time, reported PTI.
Municipal Commissioner and District Election Officer Bhushan Gagrani said a Printing Auxiliary Display Unit (PADU), a replica of the EVM control unit, was used during counting in a ward in the suburban Ghatkopar area.
Several prominent corporators lost their seats in their traditional strongholds.
Those defeated included former Shiv Sena MLA Sada Sarvankar’s son, Samadhan, and daughter, Priya, and former BEST committee chairman Anil Kokil, who had shifted from the Shiv Sena (UBT) after being denied a ticket from Lalbaug.
Senior BJP candidates Ravi Raja, Vinod Mishra, Priti Patankar and Rajul Sameer Desai also lost, along with former Congress corporator Sheetal Mhatre, Shiv Sena’s Dipti Vaykar Potnis and NCP’s Captain Malik.
Former mayors and Shiv Sena (UBT) candidates Kishori Pednekar, Vishakha Raut, Shraddha Jadhav and Milind Vaidya won their respective wards, along with former deputy mayor Hemangi Worlikar and Suhas Wadkar.
BJP’s Makarand Narwekar, one of the city’s wealthiest candidates with declared assets of Rs 124 crore, won from a Colaba ward 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 recorded the lowest voter turnout at 20.88 per cent, compared to the citywide average of 52.94 per cent across all 227 wards.
New winners 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 secured a fourth consecutive term.
Tejasvi Ghosalkar, Jitendra Patel, Bala Tawde, Preeti Satam, Sonam Jamsutkar, Yogita Koli, Jagruti Patil and Archana Bhalerao won second terms.
Former Shiv Sena MP Rahul Shewale’s sister-in-law, Vaishali, was defeated in Dharavi.
In a closely fought contest, Congress candidate Tulip Miranda won ward 90 in Santacruz by just seven votes, polling 5,197 votes against BJP’s Jyoti Upadhyay, who secured 5,190.
BJP’s Yogita Sunil Koli registered a landslide in ward 46 in Malad West, winning with 37,831 votes and defeating MNS’s Snehita Sandesh Dehalikar by a margin of 21,717 votes.
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, among Asia’s wealthiest municipal bodies, has an annual budget exceeding Rs 74,400 crore.
The last BMC elections were held in 2017, and the elected body's term ended in March 2022. Since then, the civic body has been administered by state-appointed commissioners.