Urban Reckoning

After years of bureaucratic drift and judicial rebukes, Maharashtra is finally returning to the ballot box at the grassroots. The State Election Commission has announced that voters in 246 municipal councils and 42 nagar panchayats will cast their votes on December 2, with results to follow the next day. More than 10 million voters will take part in what is, in effect, a rehearsal for larger electoral battles to come.

The State’s long-delayed civic polls will test the political pulse of its cities and the credibility of its democracy. In the absence of polls, Maharashtra’s urban governance has been run not by elected representatives but by bureaucrats.

In September this, a visibly exasperated Supreme Court had accused the State Election Commission of inaction and incompetence for failing to hold local elections, warning that grassroots democracy in India’s most industrialised state was being hollowed out. It had imposed a February 2026 deadline for overdue elections to the five largest corporations - Mumbai, Pune, Thane, Nagpur and Nashik - where administrators have ruled in place of councillors.

Given that Maharashtra’s has undergone seismic shifts in its political landscape since 2022, the stakes in the upcoming civic polls have never been higher. This will be the first civic polls that will be held ever since the splitting of the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress party (NCP) – two of the most important regional parties of the State.

The ruling Mahayuti alliance led by Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis’ BJP and comprising Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena faction and the Ajit Pawar-led NCP will seek to translate its assembly-election sweep last year into local dominance. For the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) which includes Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT), Sharad Pawar’s NCP (SP), and the Congress, these elections offer a chance to prove that urban Maharashtra is not yet lost to the ruling combine.

Nowhere is this struggle more symbolically charged than in Mumbai, where the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has become both prize and proxy for political supremacy. With an annual budget exceeding those of several Indian states, control of the BMC has long been a totem of power. The last civic election, in 2017, saw the Shiv Sena edge out the BJP by a whisker even as both were partners in the state government. Each delay in holding Mumbai’s civic polls has fuelled suspicion that political timing, not procedural difficulty, is dictating the pace of democracy.

Beyond Mumbai, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) and its industrial twin, the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC), are likely to become bellwethers of urban sentiment. Pune has witnessed the steady rise of the BJP and the erosion of old loyalties. In PCMC, the contest will test whether the BJP’s appeal among the city’s expanding working and middle classes has endured amid economic anxieties and infrastructure woes. Nashik and Nagpur, both politically charged and fast-urbanising, are expected to produce their own local twists on the state’s larger political drama.