Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray kicked-off a three-day tour of Pune district on Sunday to revive his party’s waning fortunes there.
Mr. Thackeray presided over lengthy, closed-door ‘strategy’ sessions with his party’s office bearers and workers who were summoned from across the district.
To discourage any levity on part of his workers, Mr. Thackeray forbade them from entering the meeting room, a clubhouse in the city’s upmarket Ashok Nagar area, with their mobile phones.
Amid rumours of the MNS planning to contest the Assembly polls on its own, the MNS chief also prohibited the office bearers from having any interaction with media during the meeting, which apparently dwelled on ways of rebuilding his party’s crumbling base in Pune.
Mr. Thackeray, who is planning to embark on a State-wide tour, will be visiting Nashik and Palghar districts to review the party’s state of affairs there after the conclusion of his Pune meet.
Mr. Thackeray’s campaigning for the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections had come a cropper, with the BJP-Sena candidates winning with huge margins in the very constituencies the MNS chief held his rallies.
The MNS had popped a surprise in the 2012 civic polls in Pune, emerging as the second-largest party garnering 29 seats, ahead of the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). While the NCP emerged as the single-largest party, winning 51 seats, the Congress bagged 28, followed by the BJP with 26, and the Shiv Sena with 15 among the major parties.
Despite impressive performances in the 2012 polls to the Pune and Nashik civic bodies (being once the dominant power in the Nashik Municipal Corporation), internal bickering and haphazard campaigning has caused the party to implode, with many among its top brass defecting to the BJP or the NCP.
Mr. Thackeray’s decline and fall commenced with the MNS’ twin debacle in the 2014 parliamentary and assembly elections which left the party in utter disarray.
The magnitude of its woes were compounded following its total rout in the civic polls held in February 2017, causing many to write Mr. Thackeray — and the MNS — off as a major political force in the State.
Currently, the party does not have a single MLA in the State legislature while its showing in the 2017 civic polls was abysmal. Only 13 MNS corporators won as many seats across 10 municipal corporations.
In March this year, Sharad Sonawane, the party’s lone legislator from Junnar in Pune, jumped the sinking MNS ship to join the Shiv Sena.
Mr. Sonawane, a local businessman, had quit after expressing disaffection with the MNS’ dwindling influence in Pune and in Maharashtra.