Congress’s unofficial entry in council polls from BMC

Suresh Koparkar (third from left) files his papers on Tuesday

The election in which Mumbai's civic corporators vote for sending two representatives to the upper house of the state legislature has been made interesting with a low-profile former Congress corporator filing nomination as an independent, making it a three-way fight for the two seats for which the first-and second-largest parties, the Shiv Sena and the BJP, respectively, have fielded their candidates.

The Sena has nominated former MLA Sunil Shinde, who had to vacate his Worli Assembly seat for accommodating Aaditya Thackeray in the 2019 elections. Since Shinde was promised proper rehabilitation, he has been chosen over many others. The BJP has a north Indian bigshot, Rajhans Singh, a former Congress MLA, in the race. Singh joined the saffron party a couple of years ago and got the ticket superseding another aspirant and former Congress colleague, Kripashankar Singh, who joined the BJP recently.

Both Sena and BJP are comfortably placed as far as the numbers in the BMC house of 227 elected members and five nominated, is concerned. Since there are three vacancies, 229 are eligible for voting. The Sena (99) and BJP (83) can get their candidates elected as the winner needs a 77-vote quota each. On the other hand, a former Congress corporator from Bhandup (S ward), Suresh Koparkar, who has been made to file as an independent, does not have the adequate number as his party has only 29 corporators, whereas the winner will need much more in preferential polling. Currently, Koparkar's wife is a corporator. Other parties including the Congress have 47 members.

City Congress unit president Bhai Jagtap had won one of the seats in the last elections. The other seat was won by Sena's Ramdas Kadam. Jagtap has skipped the competition this time around because of obvious reasons, but he seems to have backed Koparkar, who filed his papers on Tuesday. However, the final line-up and the seriousness of candidates like Koparkar will be decided only after the withdrawal nomination later this week.

More than two nominations in the fray will make the polling necessary on December 10. "There will be no cross-voting if the Sena and BJP nominees get elected unopposed. However, if the polling is necessary, then, we will see horse-trading that will reflect in the vote share of the winners. It won't be surprising if the Congress-backed independent gets votes less than his expectations. No wonder, then, why a sitting MLC Jagtap has backed out," said an insider in the BMC politics. He added that, in the polling, the Sena was unlikely to help the Maha Vikas Aghadi partner with its surplus votes, because it will be pertinent for the BMC's ruling party to not take any chances against the tactical BJP and win with a big number that includes its own house strength, allies and supporters.

‘My calculations are in place'

Koparkar told mid-day that his calculations were already in place and he will not withdraw his nomination at any cost. "All city Congress corporators were with me while filing the nomination today. Several corporators from other parties, especially Marathi ones, called me to make efforts to defeat BJP's Rajhans Singh. I will soon meet the State Congress president Nana Patole and Mumbai chief Bhai Jagtap to get me declared as a Congress-supported candidate. The two senior leaders will have their own calculations and I will have mine to register my win over the BJP," he said, adding that he was confident of getting the Sena's surplus and other MVA partners' votes.