BJP dominated in previous civic polls in state, can it still hold them?

In the previous round of corporation elections, Maharashtra had 27 municipal corporations, a number that has since increased to 29 with the addition of Jalna and Ichalkaranji over the past few years.

A total of 2,736 seats were contested across municipal corporations, with the BJP emerging as the single largest party, winning 1,099 seats overall. The party secured absolute majorities in several key urban centres including Panvel, Mira Bhayandar, Nashik, Dhule, Jalgaon, Pune, Pimpri Chinchwad, Sangli Miraj Kupwad, Amravati, Akola, Nagpur and Chandrapur, giving it control or clear dominance across much of urban Maharashtra.

The result marked a sharp expansion of the BJP’s urban footprint. In the previous round of municipal elections, the party had won just 320 seats. The more than threefold rise in its tally was widely seen as a spillover of its 2014 Lok Sabha victory, which had established the BJP as the state’s most powerful political force and reshaped electoral behaviour in cities and towns alike.

The BJP was followed by its then ally, the Shiv Sena, which, despite being part of the BJP-led state government, shared a strained political relationship with it and contested against the BJP in several municipal corporations, including Mumbai. The Sena won 489 seats overall and secured an absolute majority in only one corporation, Thane, where it won 67 of 131 seats. That performance, however, offers limited comfort to Shiv Sena UBT chief Uddhav Thackeray today, as much of the party’s organisational strength at the time was widely attributed to Eknath Shinde, who later split from the Sena to form his own faction.

The Congress finished next with 439 seats, managing simple majorities in Bhiwandi Nizampur and Nanded Waghala. The then undivided NCP won 294 seats but failed to secure a majority on its own in any municipal corporation, coming closest in Navi Mumbai, where it won 52 of 111 seats.

Despite these outcomes, post poll arrangements often cut across political lines. In Mumbai, the BJP, which won 82 seats, just two short of the Sena’s 84, chose to support its ally in forming the BMC administration.

As Mumbai and other major cities head into another round of civic elections in 2025, control of municipal corporations, particularly the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, the country’s richest civic body, is once again up for grabs. Unlike in 2017, when parties fought largely intact, the political landscape today is marked by splits, realignments and weakened organisational structures.

Against this backdrop, the 2017 results serve less as a guide to likely outcomes and more as a benchmark of how sharply urban politics in Maharashtra has shifted since then. How far parties have held on to or lost their civic ground will become clear only when voters return to the polling booths early next year.