Mumbai:

Shinde Sena leader Milind Deora spoke to NDTV Monday – over dosa and some chai, a welcome break from a busy election schedule – about next week’s Maharashtra Assembly poll contest against Aaditya Thackeray of the Thackeray Shiv Sena faction, and underlined his ‘local’ credentials to voters. Mr Deora will contest the Worli seat in south Mumbai – a current stronghold of the Thackeray Sena faction and won convincingly by Aaditya Thackeray in 2019.

“For me… I am a south Mumbaikar. I was born here, I live here, I work here. This is my janmbabhoomi and karnabhoomi. No doubt Aaditya Thackeray is an important leader of the opposition and has been MLA for five years. So, in some ways, this is a political challenge.”

“We wanted to mount a serious challenge for this seat… to raise the stakes. We did think about giving the ticket a local leader, but the decision was finally taken that I should contest. It was felt that giving the seat to a local person can swing both ways. What could have happened is that the opposition could say, ‘it is an unknown person’ and there could be conspiracies.”

The fight for Worli, therefore, is set to be a high-profile battle.

In an earlier interview with NDTV Mr Deora had played down any talk of a ‘personal’ contest with Aaditya Thackeray, saying he had known Aaditya Thackeray “since his childhood” and said he would not speak ill of the young politician. He did, however, criticise him and his party’s failure to develop Worli, declaring residents were “tired of speed breaker politics” hampering growth.

Milind Deora is a former Congress leader who left that party in January, weeks before the general election, and joined the Sena faction led by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, who led rebel lawmakers into an alliance with the BJP. His candidature for this seat was confirmed late last month, and immediately the headlines were about a Sena vs Sena fight for Worli.

“We have lots of good workers here…” Mr Deora told NDTV when asked about the selection process that led to him getting the Worli ticket, a choice he jokingly called “a left-field decision”.

“This area is different… it is cosmopolitan and has a strong local identity. Many here identify as ‘Worlikars’. Worli also has had local leader serving as MLAs. In that sense, Aaditya was the first ‘outsider’ MLA,” he said, taking a jab at his rival even as he emphasised his local connect.

The Worli seat is in the Mumbai (South) Lok Sabha constituency that is widely seen as the backyard of the Deora family; Murli Deora won this seat four times, including a hat-trick of wins from 1984 to 1991, and his son, Milind Deora, claimed two consecutive wins – in 2004 and 2009.

Yes, since then the Sena has held Mumbai (South).

Back in March the Shinde Sena gave its new recruit, Milind Deora, the responsibility of leading its Lok Sabha election charge in the Mumbai (South) constituency. And he did a credible job; Arvind Sawant’s winning margin dropped from 1.28 lakh votes in 2019 to just about one lakh.

But the margin of Aaditya Thackeray’s win in the 2019 state election – he had a 65 per cent vote share advantage – underlines the magnitude of the task for the Shinde Sena and Milind Deora.

The two will also face-off against Sandeep Deshpande of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena of Raj Thackeray, who is Uddhav Thackeray’s cousin.