The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Murlidhar Mohol is set to become the next Mayor of Pune. Election for the top civic post is scheduled to be held on November 22.
Though the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) alliance has fielded Prakash Kadam, the contest is expected to be completely one-sided as the BJP has an overwhelming majority of 97 corporators in the 162-seat Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC).
Current Mayor Mukta Tilak’s tenure ends on November 21. Ms. Tilak was fielded by the BJP from the Kasba Assembly segment and won an emphatic victory there.
Given the changing political equations in the State following the Assembly polls, even if the Shiv Sena, the NCP and the Congress join hands in the PMC Mayoral election to replicate the ‘Mahashiv Aghadi’, the BJP’s superior numbers will be enough for it’s candidate to sail through.
Mr. Mohol had played a vital role in engineering the victory of BJP State unit president Chandrakant Patil from the hotly-contested Kothrud Assembly segment in the recently-concluded Assembly polls.
Prior to the Assembly polls, the party had dropped its sitting Kothrud MLA, Medha Kulkarni to make way for Mr. Patil, who was perceived as an ‘outsider’ on account of his hailing from Kolhapur. Mr. Mohol, too, was an aspirant for the candidature of the Kolhapur segment.
The Kothrud seat is considered a BJP bastion and was a ‘safe’ constituency for the BJP State chief, whose prestige was at stake in the electoral contest. According to sources, Mr. Mohol, a three-time corporator is being compensated for his part in ensuring Mr. Patil’s victory in the Assembly polls.
In the 2017 civic polls, the BJP’s landslides in the Pune and the Pimpri-Chinchwad civic bodies had broken the Pawar clan’s power bases in these two municipal bodies by ending the NCP’s decade-long reigns in the cash-rich PMC and PCMC.
Meanwhile, the BJP has nominated corporator Saraswati Shedge for the Deputy Mayor’s post while the Congress has fielded Chandbi Nadaf.
In a related development, the NCP's Surmanjiri Latkar was on Tuesday elected as the 49th Mayor of the Kolhapur Municipal Corporation (KMC).
Ms. Latkar trounced Bhagyashree Shetke, fielded by the BJP and the Tararani Front, by securing 43 votes against Ms. Shetke’s 32.
All four corporators from the Shiv Sena remained absent during the voting.
The NCP-Congress coalition is in power in the 81-member KMC. An internal power-sharing arrangement between the Congress and the NCP necessitates a mayoral election every 18 months.
