Sena, Congress in battle for Mumbai

The citizens of Mumbai will. have a date with destiny on February 1 when they go to elect the people who will rule the 227-member Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, one of the richest in the city, with a budget of Rs 12,000 crores. This budget is bigger than the budget of seven states in India. Politically, it will be a struggle for supremacy between the Sena and. the Congress as to which will be the largest single party in the corporation l. The Sena - which had 104 seats in the outgoing corporation with its ally; the, BJP, which had 36 seats - has been ruling the corporation for the last two terms. For the Sena, it is the only avenue for fund collection and power-wielding as it has no other base anywhere else in the country. The corporation runs medical colleges and hospitals and is unique in the sense that it has a budget of Rs 400 crores for solid-waste management and Rs 300 crores for storm water drains. It also manages 2,000 km of roads and 4,000 km of pipelines.

This is why Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray, though frail and ailing, is coming out to address meetings and taking a role in the campaigning. He still is the only relevant, charismatic factor in the Sena as his son, executive president Uddhav Thackeray, is yet to prove himself a crowd-puller or a vote-gatherer:

The Congress is overconfident of victory as was evident in the way it tried to show the Nationalist Congress Party its place. A Congress leader insisted that the NCP did not deserve more than 40 seats but they were willing' to give them 60:' The NCR had-, won-12 seats in the list election. Finally, the alliance was called, off, by the NCP on acrimony over two seats which, for the Congress, were prestigious. One of the state's ministers, Mr Patangrao Kadam, had compared the Congress and NCP to the Pandavas and Kauravas but he failed to say who was the Duryodhana who could have taken wise decisions.
To a large extent, it will be the Narayan Rane factor that will significantly tilt the scales in favour of the Congress. Mr Rane, now a Congress revenue minister, will have to translate the support base that he claims in the city amongst the people from the Konkan into Congress votes. The Congress had 64 seats, which went up to 70 when Mr Rane's people joined them. Mr Rane has been able to get a lion's share of 33 tickets for his supporters for this election and has made the defeat of the Sena a prestige issue.

Shiv Sena rebel Raj Thackeray, who formed his own Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, could be a major irritant for the Sena as he and the Sena share the same base in the marathi-speaking working clas areas in the city.

The municipal elections this year are extremely exciting because they will show the true strength of hitherto untested people now on their own turf, like Mr Rane and Mr Raj Thackeray. They will also reveal the true feelings of the dalits and the Muslims, who feel marginalised and neglected by the major political parties. Their efforts to form a 22-member front collapsed but many of the parties, like the Republican Party factions and the Samajwadi Party, have fielded their own candidates. But more important than the political fallout of this corporation election are the contours of people's empowerment and accountability of the ,elected representatives that is 'increasingly evident on the horizon.

Hitherto people grumbled about the corporation being corrupt and ineffective and did nothing about it
The corporation being corrupt and ineffective and did nothing about it because they felt that the slum votes were the deciding factors in the elections

But this time, various NGO groups and community organisations, like in the up market Juhu-Vile Parle area, got together and decided to field their own candidate, a person with merit who had been working for the area. Even Dharavi, known as Asia's biggest slum, is fielding its own candidate.

There has been greater interaction between NGOs and citizens groups, like the NGO Council headed by Vinay Somani. Organisations like Agni are going to rate the candidates in order to help the people make decisions when voting for candidates. This is unprecedented because while there had been a lot of talk about trying to get good candidates and exposing criminal elements, efforts are now being made to translate these into reality. NGOs will even support candidates from across the parties if they are good, all in an effort to send good people to the cor-poration