Maharashtra polls: Last day of campaigning sees road shows galore

On the final day of campaigning in Mumbai, candidates held vibrant bike rallies, aiming to win voters' hearts ahead of the elections

MUMBAI: On the last day of campaigning, the final chance to win the hearts of voters, all of Mumbai was a battlefield and bike track. Candidates pulled out all the stops to end their stretch of campaigning with a flourish, hoping to cement their positions as the MLA of choice from their constituencies.

The star show was the almost-five-hour bike rally headed by chief minister Eknath Shinde canvassing for Mumbadevi candidate Shaina NC. (Bhushan Koyande/HT Photo)

The pick of the menu was bike rallies, and there were many of them.

Unarguably, the star show was the almost-five-hour bike rally headed by chief minister Eknath Shinde canvassing for Mumbadevi candidate Shaina NC. Beginning at 12 noon and going on till 4.30 pm, the high-energy event drew large crowds and was replete with speeches of development and prosperity for the constituency. The rally traversed Mumbai Central, the BIT Chawls, Kamathipura, Maulana Azad Road, Durga Devi Street, Dongri and finally culminated at Solapur Street and Puna Street.

Putting up a strong fight, Shaina’s opponent and Congress candidate Amin Patel was flanked by his own contingent of bikes and accompanied by heavyweights like former cricketer Mohammed Azharuddin and Sachin Pilot.

A little further up from Mumbadevi, Aaditya Thackeray was also the centre of a bike rally though much later in the day. His rally began at 4.30 pm in Worli, from the bus depot to Currey Road, after a whole day of pitching in for MVA candidates in other parts of Mumbai. He started out with road shows, the first for Varun Sardesai in Bandra East and then for Mahesh Sawant in Mahim before ending with a bang for his own constituency accompanied by his mother Rashmi Thackeray.

The father-daughter duo from the NCP, Nawab Malik and Sana Malik, together let bikes greet the roads of their constituencies of Mankhurd Shivaji Nagar and Anushakti Nagar. Starting at 9 am at Gavanpada bus stop, they headed in vans to Cheeta Camp, Trombay and Paylipada with hundreds of bikers in tow. In Dahisar, former union minister Smriti Irani accompanied 250 bikers, all tooting the horn for BJP candidate Manish Chaudhary in a two-hour rally from the Swami Vivekanand statue in Borivali up to Omkareshwar Temple.

Striving to do something slightly off the beaten track, BJP candidate and sitting MLA Atul Bhatkalkar chose a roofless autorickshaw for his campaign in Kandivali East, in which he was accompanied by popular Bhojpuri film star and BJP MP Nirahua. They toured the slums of Hanuman Nagar in Kandivali standing on the back seat of the rickshaw and thrilling the overwhelmingly North Indian residents who thronged around Nirahua. Later, the duo had lunch in one of the homes there, which event Bhatkalkar posted on his ‘X’ account. The MLA’s campaign ended with a rally of 1,000 bikes starting from Malad and ending at 5 pm at Thakur Complex in Kandivali (E).

Among other celebrity campaigners was Marathi actress Mrinmayi Deshpande, supporting incumbent Shiv Sena MLA Dilip Lande in the Chandivali constituency. Madhya Pradesh chief minister Mohan Yadav visited Kalina, Dharavi, Sion-Koliwada, Vikhroli, Ghatkopar East and Kandivali, all in a span of seven hours, spelling the last leg of campaigning for Mahayuti candidates there.

MNS candidate and debutant politician Amit Thackeray started his day meeting senior citizens in the Nana Nani Park at Shivaji Park. He then led a road show through the bylanes of his contentious constituency of Mahim. Sitting BJP MLA Mangal Prabhat Lodha had a walking campaign in Girgaon while Ameet Satam went around Andheri West, both seeking to retain their seats. Satam’s opponent Ashok Jadhav’s campaign overlapped with his, stopping as he did at over 40 spots to talk to voters.

Manisha Waikar, wife of former MLA Ravindra Waikar, travelled all around Jogeshwari East to campaign and meet voters. Asif Zakaria, MVA candidate from Bandra West, who has challenged sitting BJP MLA Ashish Shelar for the second time, reached out to multiple religious institutions as well as women, children, youth and the elderly during the last day of canvassing with the message ‘Asif Ka Iraada Parivartan Ka Vaada’.

In Kurla, had it not been for the elections, repair work post the fire at Savera Building outside Kurla Railway Station (East) would have been ignored. This time, Kurla’s sitting MLA, the Shinde Sena’s Mangesh Kudalkar ensured that a video of people crediting him for the electrical repair work getting completed got posted online.

As the heat and dust of the election campaign ended, BJP union minister Piyush Goyal went to a popular chaat vendor in Malad for sev puri at around 7 pm. Earlier in the day, he ended his campaigning among the Koli community at Harbha Devi Temple in Madh-Marve where he promised improvement projects to uplift them. Incidentally, Congress candidate from Malad Aslam Shaikh had objected to the shifting of Dharavikars to Madh, where land has been allotted to the Adani Group’s Dharavi Redevelopment Project.