Why Nov 20 polls may be a watershed for Mumbai

Mumbai is not just India's largest and richest metropolis, it is also the first megacity to give birth to a nativist party that went on to become a force to reckon with in both state and national politics.

- Nishant Ranjan

With the Shiv Sena (SHS) facing a vertical split in June 2022, and the two factions allying themselves to the Congress and the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), the 2024 assembly elections could well be a watershed event in the political life of Mumbai. Here are four charts that explain this in detail.

1 It took a Shiv Sena-BJP alliance to finish Congress's dominance in Mumbai

This analysis has included 36 assembly constituencies (ACS) in the Mumbai Urban and Mumbai Suburban districts - the two that largely comprise the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. To be sure, the number of ACs in Mumbai has changed over time because of delimitation of AC boundaries. This number used to be 28 between 1967 and 1977 and 34 between 1978 and 2008. An analysis of seat shares in Mumbai shows that the Congress used to dominate its politics in the initial days. Between 1962 and 1985 elections, the Congress never won less than 70% of ACs in Mumbai barring the post-emergency election of 1978 when it drew a blank in the city.