Pune: The Raj Thackeray-led Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) is struggling for popularity ahead of the Pune civic polls.
Four of its sitting corporators, including the party’s State vice-president and Pune unit head, Prakash Dhore, have defected to other parties. While Mr. Dhore joined the BJP in October this year, three others — Anil Rane, Archana Kamble and Asha Sane — defected to other parties.
The party’s prospects in its power base Nashik Municipal Corporation seems equally bad.
The MNS’s problems began after its defeat in the Parliamentary and the Maharashtra Assembly elections. The party secured just one seat in the latter (Junnar).
In the 2012 Pune civic polls, the MNS had emerged as the second-largest party by winning 29 seats, ahead of the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). However, a political analyst said the party’s mass base has since disintegrated rapidly.
“Few of its corporators, if any, have made any serious attempt to engage with civic issues. [They were] bogged down instead with petty and often shameful squabbles,” the analyst said.
In May 2015, Mr. Dhore was booked for assaulting his colleague Ms. Kamble, who was then a corporator from Bopodi. A couple of months later, criminal cases were registered against MNS corporator Rupali Patil-Thombre and her relatives for assaulting a shopkeeper and his family. Ms. Thombre was involved in a clash between two groups over space for a shop.
In October the same year, Mr. Thackeray dissolved the Pune unit’s executive committee. While ‘reorganisation’ was cited as the official reason, it was believed that dispute within MNS corporators led to the decision. Since then, the city unit of the party has been instructed to aggressively highlight the failures of the NCP and the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance in solving Pune’s civic issues and infrastructural problems.
