Pune’s changing political guard

After an eight-year hiatus, the municipal elections promise to usher in a new cohort of politicians and reset the city’s political rhythms Pune: The long-delayed civic polls herald a generational shift in Pune, arguably Maharashtra’s most politically vibrant city. When voters return to the booths in December, they will be resetting the circuitry of local power. The last municipal elections were held in 2017. Since then, the city’s politics have drifted into a liminal space. The Pune...

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After an eight-year hiatus, the municipal elections promise to usher in a new cohort of politicians and reset the city’s political rhythms Pune: The long-delayed civic polls herald a generational shift in Pune, arguably Maharashtra’s most politically vibrant city. When voters return to the booths in December, they will be resetting the circuitry of local power. The last municipal elections were held in 2017. Since then, the city’s politics have drifted into a liminal space. The Pune Municipal Corporation’s (PMC) term expired in May 2022, but the state dithered, leaving India’s seventh-largest city without elected urban governance for almost three years. With the prospect of polls repeatedly deferred, many former corporators had since quietly receded from the daily grind of politics, returning to business interests or simply losing relevance. When the long-pending reservation lottery for civic wards was finally conducted recently, it delivered another shock: dozens of established male aspirants discovered that their seats had vanished from under them. New guard All this has created an unusual political vacuum that younger leaders are eager to fill. Parties across the spectrum, from the BJP to the Congress to the NCP factions, are preparing to field fresher faces. Regardless of who wins, Pune seems destined to witness the rise of a new political class. The churn is already visible. In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, both the BJP’s Murlidhar Mohol and the Congress’s then-candidate Ravindra Dhangekar were relative newcomers to national politics. The city’s Assembly seats have also produced new faces in recent years, including Hemant Rasne and Sunil Kamble. Ajit Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party elevated Subhash Jagtap and Sunil Tingre to leadership roles, giving them a platform to shape the party’s urban strategy. Even the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a peripheral entity in Pune’s political landscape, is preparing to contest the civic polls with a wholly new leadership slate. The party most uneasy about this transition may be the Congress. Despite routinely polling between 550,000 and 600,000 votes in the city, it has struggled to convert electoral presence into organisational revival. As the Bihar election results were being announced recently, one Pune resident summed up a sentiment widely shared among Congress sympathisers: the party has votes, but not enough dynamic young leaders to carry them. The question, as he put it, is not whether the youth can help the Congress, but whether the Congress will let them. Rewind to the early 2000s, and Pune’s political landscape looked very different. The Congress then had a formidable bench which included Suresh Kalmadi, Chandrakant Shivarkar, Mohan Joshi, Ramesh Bagwe and Abhay Chhajed. The BJP had Pradeep Rawat, Anil Shirole, Girish Bapat, Vijay Kale, Vishwas Gangurde and Dilip Kamble. Sharad Pawar’s NCP, then ascendant, rested on leaders like Ajit Pawar, Ankush Kakade, Vandana Chavan and Ravi Malvadkar. But the 2014 BJP wave flattened the hierarchy. The Congress crumbled; Kalmadi and Rawat faded from view; Gangurde exited the stage. The BJP replaced its old guard with Medha Kulkarni, and then Mukta Tilak, Chandrakant Patil, Bhimrao Tapkir, Madhuri Misal and Jagdish Mulik. Now, as Pune approaches the end of 2025, even Mohol - the BJP’s rising star - risks appearing ‘senior’ in a political landscape tilting toward younger contenders. Demographics are accelerating the shift. Given that Pune’s last civic polls took place eight years ago, an entire cohort of voters since then has reached adulthood. They cast their first ballots in the recent Lok Sabha and Assembly elections; now they will vote in municipal elections for the first time. Their concerns include urban mobility, climate resilience, digital governance, employment differ sharply from the older generation’s priorities. Their political loyalties, still fluid, are likely to crystallise around leaders who can speak to these new anxieties. The coming election promises a radical change in Pune’s political ecosystem. Long dominated by legacy figures, that ecosystem is set for nothing less than a generational reset. The departure of veteran leaders, the decennial rebalancing of parties, and the impatience of a newly enfranchised urban youth all point towards a younger, more competitive, and possibly more unpredictable political order. Whether this transition will deliver better governance remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: the next generation seems determined not to wait another eight years to make itself heard.

Frayed Front

Correspondent
12 hours ago
2 min read

Nearly six years after Maharashtra’s Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) was stitched together in an improbable bid to keep the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) out of power, the alliance looks more frayed than formidable. The Congress’s declaration that it will fight the coming Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) election on its own made just a day after the Opposition’s bruising defeat in Bihar has triggered a crisis of confidence within the coalition. For a partnership already defined by uneasy compromises, shifting rivalries and ideological incoherence, the move feels less like a tactical divergence and more like an early marker of endgame.

Mumbai Congress leaders have long chafed at the arrangements that the MVA imposed from above. The city’s Congress cadre believes the party brass has ceded too much ground to Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT) and Sharad Pawar’s NCP (SP). That the BMC is India’s richest civic body, commanding a budget larger than that of some small states, immeasurably heightens the stakes.

The Congress’s allies have urged the party to show ‘magnanimity’ after the Bihar debacle, hoping to prevent fissures from widening in Maharashtra. Instead, the Congress doubled down by declaring it would field candidates in all 227 BMC seats and adopt a similar stance in other municipal bodies. The obvious inference is that the Congress wants to test its own strength, reclaim its urban footprint and resist becoming a junior partner in perpetuity.

Moreover, the party has expressed unease at its ally, Sena (UBT) leader Uddhav Thackeray’s insistence on drawing his cousin, Raj Thackeray and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) into the MVA coalition. For the Congress, already wary of losing their North Indian voter base in Mumbai, any truck with a party associated with anti-migrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric is ideologically toxic. Raj Thackeray may add Marathi aggression to Uddhav’s ‘softer’ Hindutva, but he repels the very constituencies Congress hopes to keep. The Sena (UBT) argues that MNS could consolidate Marathi votes against the BJP. However, the Congress sees an alliance that would haemorrhage its minority and migrant support.

Small wonder then that tempers are rising. Sharad Pawar has attempted to play mediator, calling for all parties to remain ‘flexible,’ but his own party’s shrinking footprint reduces his capacity to enforce coalition discipline.

Coalitions in Indian politics have collapsed for less. The MVA was always a marriage of necessity, not of conviction. After 2023, it comprised of a Marathi regional party adjusting to a post-split identity, a national party seeking revival and a breakaway NCP faction trying to regain relevance. What bound them was a negative consensus to keep the BJP out.

For the Congress, going solo is a gamble that could either reassert its relevance or accelerate its marginalisation. For Uddhav Thackeray, the BMC is the last remaining bastion. Unless the MVA rediscovers why it came together in the first place, this may well be the election where Maharashtra quietly closes the chapter on this most unusual coalition.