A lottery draw conducted by the Urban Development Department has confirmed that Mumbai's Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) will be headed by a woman from the General category in the upcoming term, according to NDTV.
Unlike previous terms, the mayoral reservation this time is being decided through a fresh lottery instead of rotational reservation. The ward-level reservations for the current BMC elections were also determined afresh, marking a departure from the earlier rotational system.
Once the reservation category is formally notified, political parties will nominate their mayoral candidates from among elected corporators. The mayor will then be elected through voting at a special General Assembly meeting, with the candidate securing more than half of the votes cast declared elected. The BMC elections themselves were delayed by nearly four years, extending the previous civic body's term well beyond schedule.
The political outcome, however, remained uncertain until the reservation process was concluded. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has emerged as the single largest party with 89 seats, while its Mahayuti ally, the Shiv Sena (Shinde faction), has won 29 seats. Together, the ruling alliance commands 118 corporators, comfortably above the halfway mark required to elect the mayor.
The opposition, by contrast, lacks the numbers to mount a serious challenge. The Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray faction) has 65 corporators, the Congress 24, the MNS six, and the MIM eight.
Ahead of the draw, the reservation lottery scheduled for January 22 was to decide whether the mayor's post would be reserved for the General category, OBC, women, SC or ST candidates. Of the 227 seats in the BMC, two are reserved for the Scheduled Tribe (ST) category.
Notably, both ST-reserved wards—Ward 53 and Ward 121—were won by candidates from the Uddhav Thackeray faction. In Ward 53, Jitendra Valvi defeated the Shinde Sena's Ashok Khandve, while in Ward 121, Tejaswi Thackeray defeated Pratima Khopade of the Shinde faction.
This had raised questions about how the Mahayuti would respond if the mayor's post were reserved for the ST category. BJP leaders, however, have maintained there is no cause for concern, noting that five ST-category corporators have been elected from the BJP, and that it is not mandatory for the mayor to be chosen from ST-reserved wards.
A senior BMC official also pointed out that between 1998 and 2022, corporators from the general category had the opportunity to become mayor on five occasions. Even when the general category applied in 2017 and 2020, the undivided Shiv Sena chose OBC corporators—Vishwanath Mahadeshwar in 2017 and Kishori Pednekar in 2019—for the mayor's post.
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