MUMBAI: After the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance’s thumping victory in Mumbai, attention now shifts to the next key battle – the mayoral election. Largely symbolic but hugely prestigious, the post in the country’s wealthiest municipal corporation is set to become the next flashpoint in the BJP-Sena rivalry.
Civic circles are abuzz over potential mayoral candidates from the BJP, with Prabhakar Shinde and Prakash Gangadhare being mentioned as frontrunners. However, the party’s Mumbai president, Ameet Satam, is giving away nothing. “This is nothing but speculation. The BJP and Shiv Sena will first discuss among ourselves and then decide. It isn’t certain which party will have a mayor,” he told HT.
With the elected body set to take charge, municipal commissioner Bhushan Gagrani’s tenure as administrator will conclude. When a senior civic official was asked if the mayoral elections were scheduled for next week, he said, “The state urban development department will decide on the reservation lottery date for all corporations. The mayoral election is possible only after the category is decided. The corporation cannot decide on the date of elections until the category is decided.”
Civic budget
Coinciding with the mayoral contest is the announcement of the BMC budget, which is due on February 4. In the last three years, the budget of one of Asia’s richest municipal corporations was passed under administrator control, without an elected body in place. Last year’s outlay was a record ₹74,427 crore for 2025-26. Asked about the timing, the civic official said, “This is all interdependent.”
Voter turnout in the BMC elections stood at 52.94%, up from the 55.59% recorded in 2017. A familiar pattern persisted, with Bhandup’s Ward 114 recording the highest turnout at 64.63%, while Colaba saw the lowest at 20.88%.
Uddhav’s position
One of the key outcomes of the election is the performance of the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena (UBT). Once leader of the undivided Sena, which ruled the BMC for close to a quarter century, the Sena (UBT) is now the principal opposition in the BMC. The party has managed 65 seats in the 227-member BMC, emerging as the second-largest party after the ruling BJP, which won 89 seats.
Sanjay Patil, political analyst and researcher at Mumbai University, said that despite the party’s split, and despite more than half the Sena’s corporators defecting to Eknath Shinde’s Sena in 2022, Uddhav has emerged with a stronger-than-expected performance. “The numbers he has secured have kept his party firmly in the race; it is not as if they have been completely decimated. The BJP was aiming for a clean sweep,” Patil noted.
He added that even at the height of its power in 2014 and 2019, the BJP was unable to win Maharashtra on its own, with the then Thackeray-led Shiv Sena and Sharad Pawar’s NCP acting as key obstacles.
“The subsequent splits were meant to dismantle that resistance. This time, the BJP was eyeing the mayor’s post independently, but the opposition restricted it to 89 seats – only a marginal increase of seven over the previous election. The BJP has still not been able to entirely erase the political space occupied by the Thackerays,” Patil said.
Community shift
The changing demographics of Mumbai and shifting allegiances of some communities influenced the outcome of the Mumbai election. Mumbai’s trading and business community decisively turned away from the Sena (UBT-MNS alliance as their politics increasingly clashed with the city’s cosmopolitan ethos.
“Over time, incidents of intimidation, aggressive street-level tactics, and rhetoric framed around language and regional identity unsettled traders, professionals and entrepreneurs, who value stability, safety and inclusiveness,” said Viren Shah, president of the Federation of Retail Traders Welfare Association.
“Remarks perceived as hostile to traders and specific communities, whether Gujaratis, South Indians or non-Marathi business owners, reinforced fears that identity-based politics threatened Mumbai’s open economic culture,” he said.
According to him, Mumbai’s electorate sent a clear message on Thursday: the city belongs to those who work, build and contribute and it will vote for growth, governance and stability over identity politics.
Ward-level patterns indicate that the BJP-Sena alliance swept much of northern and western Mumbai. In contrast, Central Mumbai’s Marathi-dominated pockets such as Dadar, Sewri, Lalbaug and Parel largely favoured the Shiv Sena (UBT), where the “Marathi manoos” card worked to a large extent.
The BJP notched up decisive victories across key South Mumbai and suburban wards. These include Gorai-Yogi Nagar (Ward 9 in Borivali west), where Shivanand Shetty won, and a clean sweep in all six wards in Mulund west (wards 103 to 108), establishing its dominance in the region.
Notable winners included former corporator Prakash Gangadhare in Ward 104, Dr Neil Somaiya in Ward 107, and Dr Hetal Gala Marvekar in Ward 103.
The MNS suffered defeats in key Mulund contests, losing in Wards 103 and 104.
In South Mumbai, all three BJP candidates from the Narwekar family registered sweeping victories despite controversies and allegations raised by independent candidates that they had been thwarted from filing their nominations.
Makarand Narwekar, among Mumbai’s wealthiest candidates with declared assets of ₹124 crore, won from ward 226. His sister-in-law Harshita Narwekar and cousin Gauravi Shivalkar-Narwekar also emerged victorious from Colaba-Cuffe Parade, Wards 225 and 227, respectively.
Elsewhere, the BJP recorded one of its biggest wins in Ward 46 in Malad west, where Yogita Sunil Koli defeated MNS candidate Snehita Dehalikar by a margin of 21,717 votes. In contrast, one of the closest contests was witnessed in Ward 90, in Bandra east, where Congress candidate Tulip Miranda edged past BJP’s Jyoti Upadhyay by just seven votes.
The Sena (UBT) held its ground in select strongholds, registering victories in Vikhroli (Ward 124) and Mahim (Ward 182). In Aaditya Thackeray’s Worli constituency, Sena (UBT) candidates won five of the six seats. The victorious candidates included Hemangi Worlikar (Ward 193), Nishikant Shinde (194), Vijay Bhange (195), Padmaja Chemburkar (196), Vanita Sarvankar of the Sena (197), Aboli Khadye (198) and Kishori Pednekar (199), with only the MNS losing ground in the area.
Former mayors and senior Sena (UBT) leaders such as Kishori Pednekar, Vishakha Raut, Shraddha Jadhav, Milind Vaidya and former deputy mayor Hemangi Worlikar also returned victorious, underlining Dadar-Worli’s continued status as a Sena (UBT) bastion, even as Mulund emerged firmly as BJP territory.
The Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena registered a victory in Goregaon’s Ward 51 and dented the Sena (UBT) their traditional bastions, as defectors Trushna Vishwasrao, Mansi Mangesh Satamkar (wife of Mangesh Satamkar) Yamini Jadhav and Amey Ghole won in their respective wards.
The Congress managed to retain pockets of influence, winning Kurla West’s ward 165 and two seats in Dharavi – wards 183 and 184. Of the remaining five seats in this large slum settlement, the Sena (UBT) won four – Wards 185, 186 and 187 and 189. The seventh seat (Ward 188).was bagged by the Shiv Sena, to sitting corporator Bhaskar Shetty. Interestingly, the BJP had fielded veteran former corporator Ravi Raja, who lost to former corporator TM Jagdish (Sena-UBT) in Ward 185.
Among the high-profile defeats were the son and daughter of former Shiv Sena MLA Sada Sarvankar, former BEST committee chairperson Anil Kokil, senior BJP leaders Ravi Raja, Vinod Mishra, Priti Patankar and Rajul Desai, along with former Congress corporator Sheetal Mhatre, Shiv Sena’s Dipti Waikar Potnis and NCP leader Kaptan Malik.
The Congress put in a dismal performance in the election, slipping from 31 seats in 2017 to 24 this time. Not all Congress leaders are dejected. Amin Patel, MLA and deputy leader of the Congress legislative party from Mumbadevi constituency, is gung-ho. A veteran corporator, his constituency included five civic wards, from where the Congress won four.
Patel said, “There will be a strong opposition in the civic house, with a total strength of 105 elected members, which is a substantial number. The ruling party has only a wafer-thin majority. Over the last two terms, the opposition has been weak, but in the past it used to be much stronger.”