In Mumbai North Central, a hotly contested Lok Sabha seat, BJP's Ujjwal Nikam faces off against Congress's Varsha Gaikwad. Nikam, known for his role in high-profile cases like the Mumbai terrorist attacks, was a surprise BJP candidate. Gaikwad, the Mumbai Congress president, shifted from her preferred seat due to Shiv Sena's demand for a different candidate. With significant Marathi, Muslim, and other voter blocs, the election outcome is uncertain, highlighting the complex dynamics of Mumbai's political landscape.
Gaikwad, MLA from Dharavi, is the Mumbai Congress president and wanted to contest the election from Mumbai South Central, the constituency her late father Eknath Gaikwad represented in the Lok Sabha. However, Shiv Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray was insistent that his party's candidate Anil Desai be fielded from the seat as the INDIA bloc candidate instead of Gaikwad. The Congress, therefore, fielded Gaikwad from the neighbouring seat of Mumbai North Central.
The BJP sprang a surprise by fielding lawyer Ujjwal Nikam as its candidate from the seat. Nikam was the special public prosecutor in the case related to the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, where a lone Pakistani terrorist, Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, was caught, found guilty and later hanged. Prior to that Nikam handled the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case. He has built a reputation of being a public prosecutor who gets a conviction in sensitive cases.
Like Gaikwad, Nikam was not his party's first choice for the seat. Poonam Mahajan, daughter of late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan, is a two-term MP from the seat. However, the BJP's internal report found that Mahajan, if fielded, would find it tough to hold the seat. The party then wanted to field Bandra West MLA and Mumbai BJP president Ashish Shelar from the seat, but Shelar, keen to play a bigger role in the state, was not interested. Eventually the BJP settled on Nikam as its candidate from the seat.
Besides being the lawyer who helped bring Kasab to justice, Nikam being a Marathi helped, considering the constituency has more than 572,000 Marathi voters.
If the BJP wanted to refresh the memory of the terrorist attack and rally its core supporters, the Congress may have helped its cause, with the leader of opposition Vijay Wadettiwar claiming that Nikam hid the alleged role of the RSS in the killing of former IPS officer and then Anti-Terrorist Squad chief Hemant Karkare, who was killed in the terrorist attack. Wadettiwar has propounded a theory that Karkare was killed by RSS sympathising policemen who were upset that Karkare exposed the involvement of radical Hindutva leaders in the Malegaon blast in 2008. The BJP has latched on to it and slammed the Congress for giving a clean chit to Kasab and Pakistan for their involvement in the terrorist attack.
Nikam's big challenge is the presence of about 440,000 Muslim voters in the constituency, especially in the backdrop of the BJP raking up Hindu-Muslim issues in the campaign, with the Muslim community gearing up to support Gaikwad. There are also close to 100,000 Christian voters and a similar number of Dalit voters in the constituency.
Gaikwad being an "outsider" does not appear to be an issue for the non-BJP supporters. "It does not matter whether the candidate is from a neighbouring constituency or this one. All that matters is whether it is a Congress candidate," said Ditta Almeida a resident of Hill Road.
There are around 200,000 Gujarati voters in the constituency whom the BJP is counting on along with the Marathi voters.
The BJP is in power in two out of the six assembly constituencies - Vile Parle and Vandre (Bandra) West. While Chandivali and Kurla have Shiv Sena MLAs, the Kalina MLA is from the UBT faction. Although Vandre (Bandra) East has a Congress MLA, Zeeshan Siddique, his father, Baba Siddique, has joined the NCP (Ajit).
Navbharat Times
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