Narayan Chaudhary, was elected as mayor of the Bhiwandi-Nizampur Municipal Corporation. Chaudhary, who had formed the Bhiwandi Secular Front with the support of eight other BJP corporators, joined hands with Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar) to come to power.
Chaudhary got 48 votes in the 90-member civic body with another Congress corporator becoming the deputy mayor as part of the arrangement with Chaudhary’s group. In the January 15 Municipal polls, Congress emerged as the single largest party with 30 seats, followed by BJP with 22. NCP-SP won 12 seats, Samajwadi Party got six, Konark Vikas Aghadi (KVA) got four and the Bhiwandi Vikas Aghadi (BVA) won three. There was one independent winner, too. With no party able to get a majority, all the parties had hidden their corporators in resorts to prevent poaching.
As the polls for the mayor election drew near, BJP was planning its own “operation Lotus” and announced Chaudhary as its Mayoral candidate. However, it later replaced Chaudhary with Sneha Patil, another BJP corporator.
The move miffed Chaudhary, who with his group of eight corporators got in touch with Congress and NCP leaders and forged a deal to come to power. State BJP president Ravindra Chavan said the party will act against Chaudhary and the BJP corporators who backed him.
“We made several efforts to convince him to withdraw. Even this morning he kept saying that he would withdraw, but he changed his mind in the end. We will take action against him,” Chavan said.
How Congress pulled it off has to be seen from how BJP has managed to win even when it was down and out. For instance, in the recently held Chandrapur polls, Congress was the single-largest party with 27 seats out of the 66 seats for which polling was done. BJP won 23. With just seven short of the majority, Congress with the help of allies UBT Sena (six), two of the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi and three of the Bhartiya Shetkari KamgarPaksh, was easily headed to power. However, just before the mayoral polls, BJP managed to woo UBT Sena to its side and got VBA and AIMIM to stay neutral.
