Andheri-E Nagar, Uddhav Raja: Thackeray May Retain Bastion in Thursday’s One-Way Bypoll | Drama Recap

Five companies of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), 256 polling booths and 1,600 employees on duty – the stage is set for Thursday’s bypoll for the Andheri East Assembly constituency in Mumbai, which started as a prestige battle for the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), but is now a mere formality with the withdrawal of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) candidate, Murji Patel.

Rutuja Latke, the Shiv Sena (UBT) nominee, is expected to register a comfortable win. She is pitted against six candidates, four of whom are independents. The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Congress have supported her candidature.

The bypoll was necessitated owing to the death of Latke’s husband and Shiv Sena MLA Ramesh Latke in May. Ramesh Latke was a corporator from Andheri for several years, before being elected as the MLA in 2014. It is the first election after a revolt in the Shiv Sena by Eknath Shinde and 39 other legislators led to the collapse of the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government.

Polling will be held from 7 am to 6 pm on Thursday, while the counting of votes will be carried out on November 6.

THE CONSTITUENCY

Andheri East is a cosmopolitan area comprising largely Maharashtrian voters, north Indians, south Indians, Christians and Muslims. It is a Sena stronghold.

Ramesh Latke had bagged 62,680 votes in the 2019 Assembly polls. Murji Patel, who had then contested as an independent, polled 45,680 votes, while Congress nominee Amin Kutty stood third with 27,925 votes.

The constituency has 2,71,502 voters. Of the total centres, only 17 are on the first floor, while the rest are on the ground floor. Covid protocols will be followed at the booths. Fifteen tables have been readied for counting. Webcasting and micro observers will be in place. A liquor ban is in force in the area from November 1. The results day will also be a dry day.

THE CHAOS BEFORE THE CALM

In Maharashtra politics, the electoral contest is usually avoided if kin are contesting the bypolls necessitated by the death of sitting MLAs or MPs, although there are exceptions.

The run-up to the bypoll, which now seems calm, saw high drama. A quick recap:

BJP withdraws candidate: The BJP decided to withdraw its candidate Murji Patel, after Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray urged the party not to contest the bypoll in reverence to the late Shiv Sena MLA Ramesh Latke. NCP chief Sharad Pawar, too, had pitched for an unopposed contest. The Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena faction had not fielded a candidate and was to back Murji Patel.

Before the BJP’s move, the bypoll was being seen as a litmus test for former chief minister Thackeray and an opportunity to assess the general mood of the electorate. The contest was also being seen as a trial to set the tone for the crucial Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) polls. Political observers claimed the BJP’s move to withdraw its candidate was aimed at denying Uddhav Thackeray a morale booster or an upper hand should Rutuja Latke emerge victorious at the hustings. The main aim of the BJP and the Shinde faction is to unseat Thackeray’s Sena from the cash-rich BMC, where the elections are due in the next few months, they further claimed.

Symbol-ic war: After the MVA government collapsed, Shinde was sworn in as the chief minister with the BJP’s support on June 30. The Thackeray and Shinde factions of the Sena are fighting a legal battle to claim the party’s name and the ‘bow and arrow’ symbol, which have been frozen by the Election Commission of India. The EC allotted ‘mashaal’ (flaming torch) symbol to the Thackeray-led faction and the ‘shield and sword’ as symbol to the Shinde group. The Thackeray faction called it injustice.

Resignation: There was chaos over the acceptance of Rutuja Latke’s resignation from the BMC. The Thackeray faction had alleged that she was being pressured to contest as a Shinde group candidate. Rutuja Latke later approached the Bombay High Court, which asked the BMC to accept her resignation, saying the use or non-use of discretion by the civic commissioner in taking a decision on the resignation in this case was “arbitrary".

Bribe for NOTA: The Shiv Sena (UBT) on Tuesday alleged that voters were being paid to choose None Of The Above or NOTA option. The campaigning for the bypoll came to an end at 5 pm.

The party has raised this issue with the EC as well as the police, said its senior leader Anil Parab. His party has video clips showing purported workers of the Republican Party of India (RPI) indulging in such acts, he said. The RPI (Athawale faction) is part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance.

With inputs from Vinaya Deshpande, Agencies

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