MNS is likely to spring surprises in Mumbai, Thane, Pune & Nashik, hurting the Big Four.
Who does Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) president Raj Thackeray consider his enemy number one?
If one goes by his tactical seat allocation in the assembly polls, along with the focused campaign schedule, it is more than amply clear that his biggest rivals remain the Shiv Sena and the BJP.
That said, the MNS, which has budgeted its resources to put up a fight for only a handful of seats, is likely to spring surprises that will affect all four mainstream parties, which include the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). Though the degree of losses and gains incurred by them could vary, the MNS is hoping to set itself up for the role of a kingmaker.
Raj has fielded 145 candidates across the state. However, the areas from where the MNS is expecting electoral dividends are confined to Mumbai, Thane, Nashik and Pune. An insider in the MNS admits, “We are targeting 15-20 seats. But, there are chances we will be restricted to 10-12 seats from areas where we have strong candidates.”
The strongholds short-listed by the party include Sewri (Bal Nandgaonkar), Bhandup-West (Shishir Shinde), Mahim (Nitin Sardesai), Charkop (Deepak Desai), Magathane (Praveen Darekar), Nashik-Central (Vasant Gite), Nashik-East (Uttamrao Dhikale) and Hadapsar (Vasant More). The party is also expecting a few surprises from Vidarbha and Marathwada.
In the parliament elections, the MNS, which cornered 4% of the total vote share, did not win a single seat. But the sizeable votes it polled—between 75,000 and 1.95 lakh in almost 11 Lok Sabha seats—adversely affected the Shiv Sena and the BJP’s electoral prospects in Mumbai, Thane and Nashik.
The Congress and the NCP are banking on the MNS to split the Sena-BJP vote bank again, thereby giving them the winning edge. A senior state Congress leader said, “Unlike in the parliament polls, we don’t have the Manmohan Singh magic to work in our favour. Hence, we have to depend on vote divisions within the Sena-BJP to retain our turf.”
Raj’s thrust on holding public rallies in Marathwada and Vidarbha is a well-calculated game plan to arrest the forward march of Sena executive president Uddhav Thackeray in rural Maharashtra. In the parliament elections, the Sena had made huge gains in rural Maharashtra, thus posing a political challenge to the Congress and the NCP.
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