Maharashtra Assembly Elections 2024: State to vote on November 20, counting on November 23

While the date for the Maharashtra Assembly elections has been announced, the ruling and Opposition alliances in the state are yet to finalise their seat-sharing arrangements.

Message from Lok Sabha elections, bypolls -- it's time to safeguard the federal structure

Maharashtra will have 1,00,186 polling centres and of these, over 57,000 polling centres will be in rural areas.

The Election Commission of India on Tuesday announced that Assembly elections in Maharashtra will be held in a single phase on November 20, with counting on November 23. The announcement comes at a time when both the ruling BJP-led Mahayuti and the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) alliances in the state are yet to finalise their seat-sharing arrangements.

Maharashtra has 9.64 crore voters, including 4.94 crore men and 4.66 crore women, Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar said in Delhi. The state will have 1,00,186 polling centres and of these, over 57,000 polling centres will be in rural areas, Kumar added.

With the elections being announced, both the Mahayuti and the MVA are likely to hurry to wind up their seat-sharing talks and arrive at a consensus.

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The BJP is set to remain the dominant party in the three-party Mahayuti alliance with the party already deciding to contest 160 of the 288 Assembly seats. “So far, the Mahayuti has finalised 240 seats and a decision on 48 seats remains to be taken,” a BJP spokesperson said. “The remaining seats will be shared by the Shiv Sena led by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP),” the spokesperson added. The Shinde Sena is likely to contest more seats than Ajit Pawar’s NCP.

The MVA has decided on 225 seats. “Our discussions on the remaining seats are underway and will be finalised in a couple of days,” Maharashtra Congress chief spokesperson Atul Londhe told The Indian Express.

Former chief minister and senior Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan said no party has claimed the highest number of seats so far. “Though we have finalised 225 seats, as of now, we cannot say who will get the highest number of seats. There are debates and discussions on each seat. Only when we add up all seats will we know who will get the maximum,” Chavan added.

In the 2019 Assembly elections, the BJP and the undivided Shiv Sena had contested together while the Congress and the undivided NCP were in alliance. The BJP had emerged with the highest number of seats, 105, while the Shiv Sena had emerged second with 56 seats. The NCP and Congress were placed third and fourth, respectively.

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However, the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance fell apart over the issue of chief ministership. While the Shiv Sena said the BJP had promised to give it the chief minister’s post, the BJP denied this.

The Shiv Sena led by Uddhav Thackeray then allied with the Congress and the NCP to form the MVA government. Two and a half years later, in June 2022, the BJP brought down the government by causing a split in Shiv Sena. A group of 40 MLAs led by Shinde joined hands to form the government with BJP. Subsequently, the BJP caused a split in the NCP and a group of around 40 MLAs led by Ajit Pawar joined hands with the BJP-Sena government to form the Mahayuti government, which has been in power since.

However, the Mahayuti government received a body blow during the Lok Sabha elections by winning only 17 seats while the MVA bagged 30 out of the 48 seats in the state. The dismal show sent tremors in the Mahayuti, which has gone all out to woo voters by announcing a slew of welfare measures and approving several development projects before the election announcement.

Manoj Dattatrye More

Manoj More has been working with the Indian Express since 1992. For the first 16 years, he worked on the desk, edited stories, made pages, wrote special stories and handled The Indian Express edition. In 31 years of his career, he has regularly written stories on a range of topics, primarily on civic issues like state of roads, choked drains, garbage problems, inadequate transport facilities and the like. He has also written aggressively on local gondaism. He has primarily written civic stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad, Khadki, Maval and some parts of Pune. He has also covered stories from Kolhapur, Satara, Solapur, Sangli, Ahmednagar and Latur. He has had maximum impact stories from Pimpri-Chinchwad industrial city which he has covered extensively for the last three decades. Manoj More has written over 20,000 stories. 10,000 of which are byline stories. Most of the stories pertain to civic issues and political ones. The biggest achievement of his career is getting a nearly two kilometre road done on Pune-Mumbai highway in Khadki in 2006. He wrote stories on the state of roads since 1997. In 10 years, nearly 200 two-wheeler riders had died in accidents due to the pathetic state of the road. The local cantonment board could not get the road redone as it lacked funds. The then PMC commissioner Pravin Pardeshi took the initiative, went out of his way and made the Khadki road by spending Rs 23 crore from JNNURM Funds. In the next 10 years after the road was made by the PMC, less than 10 citizens had died, effectively saving more than 100 lives. Manoj More's campaign against tree cutting on Pune-Mumbai highway in 1999 and Pune-Nashik highway in 2004 saved 2000 trees. During Covid, over 50 doctors were asked to pay Rs 30 lakh each for getting a job with PCMC. The PCMC administration alerted Manoj More who did a story on the subject, asking then corporators how much money they demanded....The story worked as doctors got the job without paying a single paisa. Manoj More has also covered the "Latur drought" situation in 2015 when a "Latur water train" created quite a buzz in Maharashtra. He also covered the Malin tragedy where over 150 villagers had died. Manoj More is on Facebook with 4.9k followers (Manoj More), on twitter manojmore91982 ... Read More

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