Keypoints:
- Congress leader Raja announced today that his party would go solo in the 2022 BMC civic elections.
- Also, he announced saying that there is no need for a tie-up with the Uddhav Thackeray led Shiv-Sena.
Gearing up for the 2022 civic polls in Mumbai, Congress leader Ravi Raja on Thursday, has said that the grand old party has no coalition for the polls as of now.
The Congress leader named Raja announced that his party would go solo in the 2022 Mumbai civic body elections and there is no need for a tie-up with the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena.
On Thursday, Congress leader Ravi Raja announced that Congress will be contesting the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) elections 2022 alone.It may be noted that the grand old party is a part of the Maha Vikas Aghadi government in Maharashtra, which was formed with the alliance of Shiv Sena, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Congress.
Shiv-Sena, the party which fought the Maharashtra Assembly Election 2019 in alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had snapped ties with its decades-old ally over the chief minister issue, and joined hands with the NCP and Congress to form government in the state.
Furthermore, BMC being the country’s richest civic body has been controlled by Shiv Sena for the past 30 years.
Following Sena’s exit from the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the BJP had declared that it would contest the BMC elections 2022 on its own.
In the 2017 BMC polls, the saffron party had won 82 seats, while Shiv Sena had bagged 86 out of total 227 seats in the municipal body. Later, six corporators of the Raj Thackeray-led Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) joined the Sena taking its tally to 92. The Congress and the NCP got 30 and 9 seats respectively.
In November 2019, Sena won both the Mayor and Deputy Mayor polls in Mumbai Mayor polls, retaining India’s richest civic body -Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation. Shiv Sena’s Kishori Pednekar and Suhas Wadkar won the Mayor and Deputy Mayor post on November 22, after BJP’s Ashish Shelar bowed out of the race. Shiv Sena has controlled the BMC since 1985.
