Mumbai: Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national president JP Nadda on Friday announced the appointment of Bandra MLA Ashish Shelar as the party’s Mumbai unit chief. OBC leader Chandrashekar Bawankule was named the head of the Maharashtra BJP. Shelar’s appointment as city unit head assumes significance as the BJP-Sena tussle is expected to intensify further during the election to Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) later this year. Party national general secretary Arun Singh issued a letter from Delhi to announce the appointments.
Ashish Shelar, 49, BJP legislator from Bandra west and Shiv Sena’s bete noire, will take the charge of the post from Mumbadevi MLA Mangal Prabhat Lodha who has been inducted into the cabinet early this week. Bawankule will take over from Chandrakant Patil, who too took oath as a member of the ministerial council on Tuesday.
Shelar is second term MLA from Bandra and had a short stint as school education and sports minister in the Fadnavis government in 2019. Shelar, who has been kept out of the cabinet, had served as Mumbai BJP chief for seven consecutive years since 2013.
Sources in the party say that Shelar, who hails from the Maratha community, was also considered for the post of the state unit chief but central leadership wanted him to be the city unit chief given how crucial the BMC poll is to the party at this stage. “When the party is on a spree to crush the Sena in every possible way, winning the BMC becomes most important for it. There could not be a more eligible leader to lead the Mumbai unit than Shelar. He has already been the Mumbai unit chief for two terms (2013-2019) and his contribution to the rise of the party in the city is undisputed,” said a senior BJP leader.
Shelar after the appointment said, “The next Mumbai mayor will be from Bharatiya Janata Party. The citizens of Mumbai want BJP at the helm of affairs for better administration and we will bring it into reality. The Sena rule for more than two decades in BMC was full of corruption. We will ensure that the corruption-ridden rule is thrown out from the civic body.”
BJP was only two seats behind the Sena in the BMC polls in 2017, which were fought under Shelar’s leadership. It rose to 82 seats in the 2017 elections from 31 seats won in 2012. Shelar, along with the then chief minister Devendra Fadnavis had been at the forefront of the ‘tirade’ against the Sena during that BMC election campaign.
By appointing Bawankule to head the party’s state unit, BJP has tried to woo OBCs, its voter base, ahead of the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls in 2024. Bawankule is an OBC leader who had been energy minister in the Fadnavis government during 2014-2019. Bawankule was denied an Assembly ticket in 2019 but was sent to the upper house by the party recently.
“We have the Maratha support intact thanks to the reservation given to them by the previous Fadnavis government. Secondly, we had Maratha leaders (Raosaheb Danve and Chandrakant Patil) at the helm of affairs at the state unit for two consecutive terms. The OBC vote bank has been unsettled after its reservation was struck down by the court last year. The party wants to concentrate on them ahead of the 2024 polls,” said the leader who is a former minister.