One of the biggest – and most nail-biting – Sena vs Sena battles in Maharashtra has Aaditya Thackeray, son of Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) chief Uddhav Thackeray, holding on to a lead over Milind Deora, the candidate from the Eknath Shinde faction of the party in south Mumbai’s Worli constituency.
As of 1.45 pm on Saturday, Mr Deora, a former Congress MP who jumped ship and joined the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena in January, was trailing the younger Thackeray by a margin of 6,120 votes. According to the Election Commission website, 12 rounds of counting – of a total of 17 – have been completed so far.
After counting began, Mr Thackeray was in the lead initially, but the script flipped and Mr Deora moved narrowly ahead. The Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) leader then retook the lead.
In the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly polls, Aaditya Thackeray had made his electoral debut from the Worli constituency and emerged victorious with a massive margin of over 67,000 votes.
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The segment is, however, part of the Mumbai (South) Lok Sabha constituency, which was a stronghold of the Deora family for a very long time. Murli Deora had won the Mumbai (South) seat thrice between 1984 and 1991 and then again in 1998. His son, Milind Deora, was then elected the MP from the Congress twice, in 2004 and 2009. The Shiv Sena started winning from there in 2014 and the sitting MP, Arvind Sawant, sided with the Eknath Shinde faction of the Shiv Sena after the party’s split in 2022, and won again this year.
Ahead of the Assembly elections, Mr Deora, who is a Rajya Sabha MP, had said the battle between him and Aaditya Thackeray was not a personal one but added that the Worli MLA and the Uddhav Thackeray faction of the Shiv Sena had failed to develop the constituency.
“It is not a personal battle. I have known Aaditya Thackeray for a long time. The people of Mumbai and Maharashtra had high expectations of him when he came into politics five years ago… But now I think people are tired of speed-breaker politics. The people want Maharashtra to move ahead, that is the objective,” Mr Deora had told NDTV.
After his candidature was announced, Aaditya Thackeray had claimed that people were aware that the BJP and the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena had ‘looted’ Maharashtra and pointed to the Lok Sabha elections, in which the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi had won 30 of the state’s 48 seats, reducing the ruling Mahayuti to 17.
“The biggest difference, if you look at the Lok Sabha polls too, is that people have realised that the BJP is a party of hollow promises. Maharashtra will stand against Eknath Shinde and BJP, who have looted the state,” he had said while speaking to NDTV.
