Dinesh Kamath's news 'Has MNS lost its charm in Navi Mumbai?' that was published in Newsband

Has MNS lost its charm in Navi Mumbai?

By Dinesh Kamath

Above Picture of Raj Thackeray

NAVI MUMBAI: During the forthcoming NMMC election, two parties will not be very active. The two parties are Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS).

This was not the case during the last elections when MNS had contested the elections in a big way. The decision that MNS will not contest the poll was taken by MNS chief Raj Thackeray who feels that his party doesn’t possess enough members after quite many MNS activists switched loyalties to other parties like Shiv Sena and Bharatiya Janata Party.

Many of these persons who quit MNS to join other parties were quite important and influential men and they managed to take away along with them a big number of their followers who existed in MNS. This had led to a poor show by MNS during the last state assembly elections in Navi Mumbai. In fact, the opposition parties played the major role in weakening MNS. They created temptations for some big leaders of MNS by offering them tickets to contest the election in Navi Mumbai and those leaders of MNS did fall into the trap and this proved to be a big disadvantage for MNS in the city.  

Although a big number of MNS party men quit MNS there were certain leaders like Baba Godke and Sandeep Galdude who refused to display disloyalty to Raj Thackeray and they stuck to MNS.

One MNS leader from Navi Mumbai, Gajanan Khavale, is all set to form his own party. Thus MNS appears to have little support in Navi Mumbai owing to which Raj Thackeray felt that there was no point in contesting the NMMC election in the city. 

There was a time when Raj Thackeray did have quite a huge following in the city. In fact, whenever he would visit Navi Mumbai a huge number of city residents would gather to listen to him. His fan following would make the leaders of other political parties shudder and feel insecure. But suddenly the fantastic performance of BJP during the Lok Sabha elections and rise in popularity of Shiv Sena as compared to MNS depressed many members of MNS and they chose to quit the party and join some other parties or form their own party. They somehow felt that they had no political future if they remained in MNS party for longer time.

Thus MNS has lost its charm in Navi Mumbai at least and it is left to be seen whether MNS can regain the past status that it enjoyed in the city. Raj Thackeray and his men will have to work very hard and come up with extremely brilliant strategies if they want to once regain that kind of foothold they had in the city once upon a time. Many loyal members of MNS feel that the party formed by Raj Thackeray by putting in so much efforts and sweat should not go out of existence and they are prepared to assist Raj Thackeray to any extent possible to see to it that MNS once again becomes a viable party at least in Navi Mumbai.