In its debut state election in 2009, Raj Thackeray’s party won 13 assembly seats and managed to steal a significant share of votes from saffron allies Shiv Sena and BJP. With no more alliances for voters to look up to before the October 15 polls, MNS workers believe they are now on an equal footing with the four older parties and have a genuine chance of winning more seats.
This mood was palpable at the party’s head office at Shivaji Park on Friday, when MNS election candidates from across the state had gathered to complete the paperwork for filing their nominations.
Strong presence
“If the Shiv Sena and BJP votes are split, the MNS will surely be able to win in my constituency, where we have had a strong presence for the past five years,” said Vikas Kamble, a doctor who is contesting the assembly election from an MNS ticket in Ambernath, a town just north of Mumbai.
Ambernath's present legislator is a Shiv Sainik and voters want a change, says Kamble. “The constituency still has problems of water shortage, bad roads and drainage, which have not been addressed in five years,” he said. Had the BJP still been Shiv Sena’s ally, the two-party combine would have benefited from the Modi wave, he admits. But now that the BJP is isolated too, Kamble is quick to dismiss the credibility of any such wave.
“Before the Lok Sabha polls, [Prime Minister] Narendra Modi’s campaign raised a lot of questions but provided no solutions,” said Kamble. “The Modi wave is just a media creation.”
In rural Nanded, a district in Maharashtra’s Marathwada region, it is precisely because of the Modi factor that the MNS does not see the Shiv Sena or the BJP as competition. “During the national election, the Shiv Sena candidate kept telling his voters to focus just on Modi, and he lost to the Congress,” said Mangesh Tawde, who had come to the Mumbai head office as a representative of Suresh Sarda, the MNS candidate for Nanded’s Hadgaon constituency. “We need to focus on defeating the Congress this eletion.”
Confident of victory
Meanwhile, Dilip Dhotre, another candidate from rural Maharashtra, had come to the MNS office with a whole posse of supporters from Pandharpur constituency in Solapur. Despite being an MNS member from the time the party was launched in 2006, this is Dhotre’s first time as an election candidate, and he is more than confident of victory.
“My area has seen Congress MPs and MLAs for decades, but even before the Congress and the NCP split, their own party workers were deserting them and joining the Shiv Sena or BJP,” said Dhotre. The two parties have not yet been able to nominate a candidate for the assembly polls, “but my campaigning started a month ago,” he said.
In Pandharpur, the erstwhile saffron alliance of the Shiv Sena and BJP has no significant presence, and most of the political is played out through the 27 sugar factories in the district. “Most of the factories so far are owned by the NCP, who threaten not to buy sugarcane from farmers who don’t vote for them,” said Dhotre, a farmer who now aims to provide those sugarcane growers with a solution. How? “I am opening a sugar factory of my own,” he said.