Its electoral fortunes may have been dipping over the past few years. The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), however, may soon have something to cheer about. The party will soon be installing its corporator as the mayor of Jalgaon Municipal Corporation. The appointment of MNS corporator Lalit Kolhe, who has been serving as the city’s deputy mayor, is part of a political deal that the party has struck with Khandesh Vikas Aghadi (KVA). The KVA is a front floated by controversial strongman and former Maharashtra minister Suresh Jain.
Kolhe’s formal appointment is set to take place the coming week. The prelude to his appointment was the resignation of sitting Jalgaon corporator Nitin Ladda on Wednesday. Ladda, a corporator from the KVA, had served as the mayor for only 16 months and was asked to resign by his mentor and political boss Suresh Dada Jain. Last year, Jain was released on bail by the Supreme Court after having spent more than four years in jail. The nine-term legislator had been arrested by the Jalgaon police on March 12, 2012 for his alleged involvement in a corruption case pertaining to a housing project.
Jain, a perennial party hopper, has been elected on the ticket of almost all the major political parties in the state, except the BJP. Irrespective of his political affiliations, Jain had continued with the KVA, which has been governing the Jalgaon Municipal Corporation for over two decades. In 2013, the KVA, which was fighting an electoral battle with the BJP for the Jalgaon Municipal Corporation elections, managed to win 33 seats in the 75-member Jalgaon Municipal Corporation.
In order to control the corporation, it had decided to join hands with the MNS, which had 12 corporators. The arrangement between the two parties was that while the KVA would get the mayor’s seat for the first four years, it would be handed over to the MNS for the last one year. Interestingly, 41-year-old Kolhe, who is the most visible face of the MNS in Jalgaon, has a chequered history. He was once accused of polygamy by his former wife. An FIR was also registered against him by the Juhu Police under sections 498A (husband or relative of woman subjecting her to cruelty) and 420 (cheating) of the Indian Penal Code.
Interestingly, he also shares an uneasy relationship with the MNS leadership and had threatened to quit the party. Once Kolhe formally takes over the charge as the mayor, he will only be the second mayor from the party. The MNS had managed to install a mayor in Nashik earlier. The support base of the MNS in the state has been crumbling. The party managed to win only 13 seats in the ten municipal corporations in the state this time as compared to the 2012 polls when it managed to get 112 corporators elected.
The party, which in 2009 had 13 MLAs, does not have a single representative in the Maharashtra Assembly at present. Its lone representative elected on the MNS symbol had quit the party to set up his own organisation in February this year. It had manged to secure only 3.9 lakh votes in the recently held elections which were only 7.8 per cent of the total votes polled. Even new entrants like AIMIM had managed to win double the number of seats than the MNS.
