As the election nears, the campaign narrative appears to be shifting from civic issues to a sharper political binary: Marathi pride vs Hindu identity

Nearly a decade after the last civic poll in 2017, the Brihanmumbai Corporation (BMC) election is finally scheduled for January 15. The prolonged delay was a result of litigation over the OBC reservation and redrawing of ward boundaries to reflect population changes. Repeated delays meant that the BMC functioned without an elected civic body and a mayor, while the state government-appointed administrators ran the city for four years. This is set to change after a fortnight amid Maharashtra’s dramatic political fragmentation: the split of Shiv Sena in June 2022 and NCP a year later, which had an equally significant impact on the 2024 Lok Sabha and assembly elections.

Civic polls for 28 other cities in Maharashtra are also scheduled for January 15. However, the spotlight is on Mumbai for obvious reasons. The BMC being Asia’s richest civic body, the sheer size of its budget is what makes the civic poll important for every political party. Moreover, the BMC election attracts national- and state-level attention, as it is considered a marker of the public mood and political equations in Maharashtra. For over three decades, the BMC has been controlled by the Shiv Sena. But the split in the Sena and new political alliances in the state mean that the forthcoming election is a crucial test to determine which Sena is the “real” Sena and who will get to represent the voice of Marathi people.

Who will get to control India’s richest civic body is a bit of a puzzle, given the muddle Maharashtra politics is in—strange alliances and the impact the poll outcome will have on the state’s politics. It is a contest that is crucial for the current political alliances in Maharashtra and for individual parties, more so for the two factions of the Shiv Sena: the Eknath Shinde Sena and the Udhav Balasaheb Thackeray Sena. While it is a crucial election for the BJP, which it has been desperately trying to win on its own and had come a bit close to in 2017, it is a battle for prestige between the two factions of the Shiv Sena.

This makes the BMC election largely a direct fight between the BJP-Shinde alliance and the Udhav-Raj Thackeray reunion. Shinde is the bridge between the BJP’s Hindutva and the Sena’s “Bhoomi Putra” sentiment. When the Sena split in 2022, Shinde had the numbers and Udhav the sympathy. In the 2024 Lok Sabha poll, Udhav’s Sena, part of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), won 3 out of 6 seats in Mumbai, and the MVA did well in the state. But the assembly election six months later presented a vastly different picture—the MVA crashed to its worst defeat, while the Mahayuti alliance did stunningly well. The Mahayuti also did exceedingly well in local body polls last month.

Against this backdrop, the coming together of the once-estranged Thackeray cousins—Udhav and Raj—on a plank of Marathi identity and language is being seen as a crucial emotional factor that could resonate well with Marathi voters. For Udhav, an alliance with Raj could prove crucial, and the same goes for Raj. Both are fighting for their survival and political relevance in a metropolis which has been the Shiva Sena’s home ground since 1968, when it first contested the BMC election. While it soon emerged as a formidable force in Mumbai, the Sena has never won a majority and has relied on strategic alliances to gain power in the BMC. 

Between 1985, when it was just short of a majority, and 2017, save the 1992 election, the Sena was the single largest party in the BMC. However, even during its best years in the 1990s, it did not cross the majority threshold. This underlines the limits of identity-based “son-of-the-soil” politics in a cosmopolitan city with a significant migrant population. On the other hand, the BJP was never a strong force in the city’s electoral politics, and its alliance with the Sena helped the saffron alliance control the BMC jointly. It worked as a political compact of convenience till the BJP expanded its footprint on the Hindutva plank and the Sena realised the risk of being swallowed by its ally. For a regional, identity-based political party like the Sena, it was a mistake to have diluted its core Bhoomi-Putra ideology by aggressively embracing Hindutva, which helped the BJP expand its influence in Maharashtra but has not delivered much benefit to the Sena. After coming to power at the centre in 2014, the BJP has been on a roll in Maharashtra, as reflected in the 2014 assembly election results and the 2017 BMC poll when it won 82 seats, its best performance in two decades, attributed to the party’s aggressive campaign centred on transparent governance and development, which was explicitly pitched at targeting the Shiv Sena, an ally of the BJP in the state government then, but contested the civic body poll independently.

The split in the Sena-BJP alliance in 2017 upset the long-standing saffron alliance in Maharashtra. The subsequent split in the Sena and the NCP pushed political fragmentation to the next level. The vertical splits in two regional parties have transformed earlier cohesive vote banks into fierce competing forces, each laying claim to legacy, legitimacy, and grassroots loyalty. On the other hand, the BJP has moved from being a fringe player in Mumbai’s electoral politics to a central role. Though it is a multipolar contest, the BMC election is a big battle for the Thackeray cousins and the BJP-Shinde Sena alliance, for whom taking control of the civic body from the Thackerays is a big challenge. 

For the Thackeray cousins and their embattled parties, facing existential crisis and the troubling question of political relevance, the election is a critical test to protect their vote bank and relevance. This is why the duo has pitched the election as an existential battle not just for their own parties but for the entire city and its Marathi identity. If the Thackerays lose this battle, it could trigger a serious threat to their political future. As the election nears, the campaign narrative appears to be shifting from civic issues—dug-up roads, hillocks of garbage, open drains, potholed roads, traffic jams, crumbling civic infrastructure, poor health services, and declining public transportation—to a sharper political binary: Marathi pride versus Hindu identity. Whether Marathi pride will prevail over Hindu identity remains to be seen.