The Vile Parle and Chandivli Assembly segments helped Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Poonam Mahajan beat Congress’s Priya Dutt in the Mumbai North Central Lok Sabha (LS) constituency. Mahajan got the highest lead of 73,129 votes from the Vile Parle Assembly segment, represented by the BJP, followed by a lead of 27,255 in Chandivli, a Congress stronghold. Together, these two segments accounted for 76% of Mahajan’s winning margin of 1.30 lakh votes.

After Vile Parle and Chandivli Assembly segments, Mahajan scored 15,585 more votes than Dutt in Bandra (West). She defeated Dutt by a total margin of 1,30,005 votes, nearly 55,000 lesser as compared to the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

However, Mahajan got thin leads in the Shiv Sena-represented areas such as Kurla, Kalina and Bandra (East). Her lead was the lowest — just 1,276 — in the Bandra (East) Assembly segment, which houses Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray’s residence, Matoshree.

In the other two Sena-dominated Assembly segments — Kalina and Kurla — too, the winning margin was just 9,483 and 5,658 respectively.

Upset for not including photos of Uddhav’s son, Aaditya Thackeray, head of the Sena youth wing, in her banners, Sena workers had initially refused to campaign for Mahajan. She was forced to visit Matoshree to resolve the issue.

However, Sena workers, denied any such reasons behind the lesser margin in the three segments. A Sena MLA, who didn’t want to be named, said, the three Assembly constituencies have mixed voters and are also dominated by Muslim and Dalit voters. Mahajan’s margin might have thinned because of the large number of votes the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) candidate got in these constituencies, said the MLA.

Of the total 33,377 votes VBA candidate Abdur Rahman Anjaria secured, he got 7,862 votes in Kalina, 4,854 in Kurla and 5,641 in Bandra (East) Assembly segments. Moreover, 10,603 voters chose to use the NOTA option in the constituency.

Meanwhile, Chandivli Congress MLA Naseem Khan said the LS polls were won by the BJP on emotional grounds and not developmental matters. “The Assembly elections are a completely different ball game, in which local candidates matter. The LS vote was for Modi and not Mahajan. I will be able to cover this gap and win,” he said.

However, BJP worker and former Vile Parle MLA, Krishna Hegde, claimed the Sena and BJP’s “committed cadre”, who have ground-level penetration, was the key to Mahajan’s victory, besides other reasons. “In the constituency, BJP-Sena alliance has nearly 30-32 corporators, as compared to six to seven of the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), apart from five MLAs. So, we had better ground-level penetration,” he said.

First Published: May 25, 2019 01:54 IST