The Tiger marks out territory

MUMBAI: When push came to shove, the Shiv Sena and BJP fell back on their ‘tried and tested’ strategy to retain their grip on the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation.

Recognising the challenging battle, Sena managers wooed the 26 per cent Marathi vote bank, rolling in their big gun Bal Thackeray who hit the target with his old mantra ‘Mumbai is for Marathis’. The senior Thackeray had failed to work the same magic in the last elections.

The parallel, but synergetic strategy of the BJP, which concentrated on the non-Marathi vote bank, primarily the North Indians (18 per cent), and the Gujaratis (15 per cent), also helped the Sena. A case in point was the BJP president Rajnath Singh inaugurating the city’s campaign by breaking a coconut to win over migrants and the Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi playing his Hindutva card in Gujarati-dominated localities. 

An upbeat Manohar Joshi told DNA that the city has ‘reiterated its faith’ in the Sena. But that is only partially true. Compared to the last polls, the Sena’s tally has actually declined from 103 to 83, and the BJP’s from 37 to 28 seats.

The saffron alliance benefited from the reluctance of the non-Marathi voters to vote en masse for the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party. The lacklustre campaign by the two also did not help matters.

BJP general secretary Vinod Tawde admitted as much as much to DNA. “It is a fact that we succeeded in retaining our vote bank. Our strategy to flash emotive cards (Hindutva and son of the soil) also worked.”

The failure of the mint-fresh Raj Thackeray-led Maharashtra Navnirman Sena to make inroads also helped Sena. The BJP, in particular, had deployed senior managers to ensure that “disillusioned” saffron loyalists don’t drift to the MNS.

The tactical anti-Congress stance of the Samajwadi Party and Republican Party of India (RPI) also worked to Sena’s advantage. Interestingly, the number of people voting for the alliance has actually increased.

Statistics show that the Shiv Sena-BJP combine returned to the BMC in 1997 with 44 per cent, and in 2002 with 42 per cent. This time around, a record 45.5 per cent of votes polled were in their favour.

The division of secular votes did more damage to the Congress and NCP than their leaders care to admit publicly. The Congress polled 27 per cent, while the NCP got 12.2 per cent. Taken together, it’s a shade less than 40 per cent.

For all you know, if both had fought together the results might have been different. That’s a big ‘if’ that Vilasrao Deshmukh and Sharad Pawar would be introspecting about deeply.