As parties gear up for BMC polls, lottery for ward reservation to be held today

“At present, all the 29 municipal corporations are running without elected representatives and all of them will conduct a lottery of all the wards and constituencies that will go for elections. After the lottery is over, suggestions and objections will be invited by us and the final draft of the wards will be published on November 28,” said an official.

The lottery is a major deciding factor for political parties in allocating seats to its candidates, since it determines how many of the total number of wards will be reserved for women candidates or candidates coming from backward communities.

After coming to power in 2019, the Uddhav Thackeray led-Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government had proposed increasing the number of municipal wards in Mumbai to 236 from 227. Therefore, after the general body of elected representatives got dissolved in 2022, the BMC had carried out a lottery of 236 municipal wards for the civic elections that was supposed to be held that year.

However, the Eknath Shinde-led government, formed in in June, 2022, challenged the decision and the Bombay High Court (HC) ordered that the next civic elections will be fought in 227 seats only.

“The ward delimitation is being carried out on the basis of the 2011 Census. However, since 2017, Mumbai has witnessed multiple additions to the city’s overall infrastructure which includes the coastal road that has come up, the Atal Setu, the Metro Corridors. These are non-residential zones, therefore, they didn’t add up any uptick in Mumbai’s overall population. However, the overall alignment of these places have been included in the ward boundaries,” the official said.

At the political front, Maharashtra has witnessed a series of political dramas with both the Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) witnessing a vertical split.

Therefore, the upcoming civic poll in Mumbai – is going to be a battle for prestige and existence for parties belonging both from the ruling and the opposing sides in the state.

While the BJP is looking forward to making in-roads into the largest civic body by being the largest party for the first time, the upcoming elections will also be a battle for survival for the Shiv Sena (UBT).

Sanjay Patil, a Mumbai-based political researcher, said that the split in the two major political parties will emerge as one of the biggest factors in the election.

“The undivided Shiv Sena and NCP were major hurdles for the BJP to gain inroads into the state as well as gain control over Mumbai. Now, with the engineered split dividing the party, the BJP has an upper hand. Furthermore, the BJP also has an advantage as they currently hold power at the Centre and the state,” said Patil.

Asif Zakaria, former Congress corporator, said that the party has already kicked off preparations and internal meetings to gear up for the upcoming elections.

“Since we have not been in power, it is certainly going to be challenging but going to fight it and have already commenced our preparations. We will be highlighting how the BMC has been exploited over the past few years in the absence of elections and the lack of accountability. In the coming months, we will flag the blatant corruption and scams over the past few years including beautification and road concretisation,” said Zakaria.

For Sena (UBT), for whom the BMC has traditionally been a stronghold, political observers said that the elections will be a key battle.
“Following the split, it will not be an easy battle considering the dominance as well as the resources that the BJP holds,” said Patil.
However, Sachin Padwal, former Shiv Sena (undivided) corporator who is now part of Sena UBT, maintained that the defection of its former leaders to the ruling parties will not hold any impact on their performance.

“We are a cadre-based party so even if some leaders leave, we have a male and a female Shakha Pramukh in each of our 227 wards who are selected for the posts. Shiv Sena’s voters are thumping voters who are party loyalists. And now with two Thackerays coming together, the Marathis are with us,” Padwal told The Indian Express.

Meanwhile, Vinod Mishra, former corporator and group leader in BMC from the BJP said, “Our focus is going to be on highlighting 11 years of development in BJP’s power and the 25 years of Shiv Sena which saw rampant corruption by Uddhav Thackeray on several fronts.”