With elections to 14 civic bodies in Maharashtra, including the cash-rich Mumbai, Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad municipal corporations likely to be held in April, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Pune city on March 6 is expected to give a major boost to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as it gears up to retain its dominance in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad.
In his typically hectic schedule, the PM will be inaugurating the Pune Metro rail – touted as the panacea to the city’s burgeoning traffic woes; unveil a statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj in the main building of Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC); lay the foundation stone of Pune Riverfront Development Project whose objective is to clean and rejuvenate 44 km stretch of the city’s polluted rivers and inaugurate a slew of other development works.
While he has visited Pune a number of times after becoming Prime Minister, Mr. Modi will be only the second PM to visit the PMC building after Jawaharlal Nehru, who had visited the civic body premises at the time of the 1961 Pune floods.
After Mr. Modi came to power at the Centre in 2014, the BJP had managed to form a government in Maharashtra the same year. It had swept all six seats in urban Pune in the 2014 Maharashtra Assembly election.
Since then, to ensure the BJP’s dominance in the cash-rich PMC and the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC), Mr. Modi had laid the foundation stone of the Pune Metro rail project in December 2016 – just ahead of the crucial 2017 civic polls to the two civic bodies – amid furious political bickering with the Congress and the NCP, who claimed credit for the Metro project.
The BJP then went on to bag an unprecedented 97 of the total 162 seats in the 2017 PMC poll while supplanting the NCP from the PCMC (winning 77 of the 128 seats) in a personal blow to Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader and Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar, who lost control of his Pimpri-Chinchwad stronghold.
The Congress, which once held Pune, has seen a precipitate fall in its fortunes since the BJP’s ascendancy.
The PM had again visited the city in 2018 when the BJP under Devendra Fadnavis was in power in the State to inaugurate the third phase of the Pune Metro Rail project. At the time, Mr. Modi had said the Hinjewadi line would ameliorate the traffic woes of lakhs of professionals and citizens working and living in one of India’s biggest IT hubs.
According to senior city-based political analyst Rajendra Pandharpure, the PM’s visit this time is an attempt on the BJP’s part to send the message that the development of Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad rests on the party and that the Centre will always watch over the interests of these twin cities.
“There is an aura created by the BJP that it is PM Modi who has got the Metro in Pune. By his repeated visits at crucial junctures just ahead of civic polls, the BJP is also trying to highlight the continuity of its relationship with Pune even though the party is out of power in the State,” says Mr. Pandharpure.
Given the BJP’s penchant unleashing their top guns in every election – National, State or civic body polls – Mr. Modi’s visit follows that of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, who visited Pune in December last year to galvanize the party rank-and-file ahead of the civic polls.
This time, the BJP faces the ruling tripartite ‘Maha Vikas Aghadi’ coalition of the Shiv Sena, the NCP and Congress.
The NCP, led by Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar, has been on a war footing to wrest back Pimpri-Chinchwad from the BJP with Mr. Pawar laying the ground for a comeback since the MVA’s formation in early 2020.
Incidentally, while the Pune Metro project was mooted by the Congress-NCP alliance during their tenure in the PMC, the implementation of the project was delayed after citizens’ groups backed by the BJP leaders had objected to the elevated Metro route alongside Mutha river.
Once in power after 2017, the BJP has shown no such ‘environmental scruples’ with the BJP-controlled PMC standing committee approving ₹865 crores of work for the ₹4,400 crore Riverfront Development project ahead of the PM’s visit – despite strong opposition to the project from environmentalists.
A week ago, the BJP leadership in the PMC had sanctioned infrastructure projects worth ₹2,500 crore. These approvals come a mere three weeks before the end of the BJP’s five-year term in the civic body.
The BJP has been approaching the civic polls in the manner of a State Assembly election. In fact, BJP Pune chief Jagdish Mulik, explaining his party’s approach to the civic election, had alluded to Amit Shah’s organizational strategy that had won Uttar Pradesh for the saffron party in 2014.
“The party has created booth committees with a shakti kendra to maximize its outreach and gain fresh recruits. Days after Mr. Shah’s visit, the party in its recruitment drive has managed to reach out to more than six lakh people. These drives involve a pamphlet detailing central schemes for the city and their completion details,” said Mr. Pandharpure.
The PM schemes, be it the Sukanya Samriddhi Account (targeted at the parents of girl children) or ensuring completion of vaccination, BJP workers have been actively reaching out to every section in the city including minorities.
While the NCP and the Congress, too, have been trying to match the BJP, the Congress is hamstrung with organizational issues in Pune, where it once ruled supreme.
While it is unclear as yet whether the three MVA allies will jointly contest the civic polls, analysts opine that the ruling parties, particularly the NCP, will offer stiff resistance to the BJP in Pune.
“Ajit Pawar, in his capacity as Pune’s Guardian Minister has been leading the party’s efforts to regain lost ground right from day one. This time, it may not be a cakewalk for the BJP given that the MVA allies have performed well in other local bodies elections held earlier this year,” said another analyst.
