Raj Thackeray rallies draw big crowds, but fail to stop saffron surge

PUNE: Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray’s campaign against Prime Minister Narendra Modi was a damp squib.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena alliance has won in eight of the 10 seats where Thackeray addressed rallies.
Thackeray is known as a captivating orator, and with no MNS candidate in the fray, Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) had hoped this would work to their advantage.
However, his fiery speeches against the BJP — which drew large crowds — failed to sway the electorate, as the saffron alliance bagged 41 of the 48 Lok Sabha constituencies in the state.
After the BJP-Sena win, the MNS chief tweeted that the election result was “incomprehensible” and “beyond rationale”.
The party, whose returns have been steadily diminishing over the past few years, has now set its sights on the assembly elections, to be held later this year.
“We will need to do a pre-poll assessment into where we failed as an independent party. We maintain that we did not present ourselves as supporters of any other party,” MNS representative Ajay Shinde said.
The BJP, on the other hand, has largely dismissed the Thackeray factor. Senior party leaders said his rallies have come a cropper.
“His vicious rallies against the prime minister and BJP chief Amit Shah have failed to make any dent... with none of his party members contesting, he does not have much of an impact,” a BJP leader said. “Just speeches will not change the people’s mindset,” another BJP leader added.
The MNS chief kicked things off with a rally in Mumbai on Gudi Padwa, and followed it up with a number of rallies in south, north and west Maharashtra.
Of the 10 rallies Thackeray addressed, eight seats were bagged by the saffron combine, with only Baramati and Satara being retained by the NCP.