MUMBAI, 2 February 2007 — Polling was largely peaceful as well over 50 percent of the voters in 10 municipal corporations in Maharashtra cast their votes in the crucial civic elections yesterday. Reports came in of stray incidents of violence and poll malpractices.
Voting that began at 8.30 a.m.
ended at 5.30 p.m. Counting of votes will be taken up today and the results will be declared the same evening. The elections were held to elect 1,158 ward representatives from among 9,247 candidates at 13,616 polling stations in the state’s 10 bigger cities including Mumbai.
Negligence by the Maharashtra government came to the fore when the first citizen of the state — Gov. S.M. Krishna — was denied the right to vote by poll officials. The governor was upset when the poll officials where he had gone to cast his vote, informed him that his name was not on the electoral rolls. Miffed by the denial and the negligence of the state government, the governor left the polling booth in a huff.
The civic bodies apart from the one in the country’s commercial capital that went to polls using electronic voting machines (EVMs) were Nagpur, Pune, Thane, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Nashik, Solapur, Ulhasnagar, Akola and Amravati. While the polling percentage crossed the 60 percent mark in Nashik and ranged between 50 and 60 elsewhere, it remained below 40 percent in Mumbai where much enthusiasm was witnessed for the major part of the day.
A galaxy of film personalities including Sanjay Dutt, Aamir Khan, Preity Zinta, Hema Malini, Shabana Azmi, Javed Akhtar, Gulzar, Yash Chopra, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra and Kunal Kohli exercised their franchise and gave sound bytes to TV channels expressing their concern about lack of civic amenities in the metropolis.
Clashes involving activists of Shiv Sena, Maharashtra Nav Nirman Sena (MNS) and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) were reported from central Mumbai, Kamathipura in south Mumbai, Andheri, Thane, Nashik, Ulhasnagar, Akola and Nagpur.
While polling was called off at a booth in Ulhasnagar for some time following its ransacking by some activists allegedly belonging to the NCP, a case of bogus voting was detected in Mumbra under the Thane Municipal Corporation (TMC).
In Ambewadi area of Andheri, some voters who had recently shifted to Manukhurd alleged that they were manhandled by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) workers when they came to cast their votes because their names existed on the rolls there. The stray incidents mercifully belied fears of large-scale violence in view of the fierce rivalry witnessed between the activists of the Shiv Sena on the one hand and between those of the Congress and NCP on the other.
As many as 343 out of 6,951 polling stations in Mumbai with a voter strength of over eight million were declared sensitive.
The number of sensitive booths in the neighboring Thane was even more — 344 — and that in the state’s second capital Nagpur 263. As polling began on a brisk note in Mumbai, expectations of a high vote percentage rose among political workers and observers only to reconcile to the reality that it ultimately remained where it normally does in the metropolis — below 40 percent.
The earlier pessimism of a drop in the polling average too was proved wrong.
Some pollsters had predicted the drop because of a chaotic election scene marked by the presence of a myriad of loosely held groupings and independents, apart from major political parties.
While the Congress, having five out of six MPs, 17 out of 34 legislators and 63 out of 227 ward members on its side in Mumbai, made an all-out bid to wrest the 227-member BMC from the ruling saffron alliance on its own steam, the NCP having grown in strength spectacularly in the last two years is expected to take a quantum jump from 14 to 40 in the civic body.
In the face of such a fierce onslaught from the Congress and NCP and a considerable challenge posed by Raj Thackeray’s MNS, the 139-strong Sena-BJP alliance is fighting with its back to the wall to retain its control over the country’s largest civic body which has an annual budget of Rs.120 billion.
A close finish is on the cards in Thane, Pune and its satellite township of Pimpri- Chinchwad with NCP appearing to have an edge and in Nashik, Solapur and Nagpur.
In Amravati and Akola in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, a Congress victory is being considered a certainty.
The Congress is ruling in four of the 10 municipal corporations (Nagpur, Amravati, Pune and Solapur), NCP in two (Pimpri-Chinchwad and Ulhasnagar) and Shiv Sena-BJP in the remaining four, that is Brihanmumbai, Thane, Nashik (Sena in the lead) and Akola (BJP in the lead).
Leading the party campaign for the civic polls like a man possessed, the Mumbai unit president of the Congress, Gurudas Kamat expressed confidence Wednesday about his party winning 120 seats in the BMC, that is a good six over and above the majority mark though the most liberal among a myriad pre-poll surveys have given the party no more than 85 seats.
