Ahead of the Lok Sabha Elections, Uddhav Thackeray, the chief of the Shiv Sena UBT, makes a significant revelation

Mumbai: In the 2024 parliamentary elections, Uddhav Thackeray, the former chief minister of Maharashtra and president of the Shiv Sena (UBT), said that he will not be supporting the Lok Sabha candidate of his party or that of his previous alliance, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), for the first time in more than thirty years.

The Congress has been assigned the Mumbai North Central LS constituency, which was formerly known as the Mumbai North West seat. This is the seat where Mr. Thackeray’s residence, “Matoshri,” is located. The opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) allies share this seat.

Consequently, in yet another first, Thackeray and his family will be casting their votes for the Congress candidate, a new ally, as the SS (UBT) is now a major player in the opposition INDIA bloc and Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition.

The Nationalist Congress Party (SP) was not given a seat in the nation’s commercial hub, while the SS (UBT) will compete in Mumbai South, Mumbai North, Mumbai South Central, and Mumbai North East seats. The Congress will compete in Mumbai North and Mumbai North Central.

Congress Will Soon Announce Candidates

The names of the congressional nominees for the two seats it is running for will be revealed the following week. One of the seats is Mumbai North Central, which is home to the SS (UBT) tiger’s den. It is said that the late actor-turned-politician Sunil Dutt, who was elected to the Lok Sabha five times, and the undivided party of Balasaheb Thackeray had an unofficial arrangement with him.

Recall that in all of the 1989 assembly and parliamentary elections, the (undivided) Shiv Sena and BJP formed an alliance that aided in the election of their candidates for most of Mumbai’s LS seats.

BJP’s Poonam P. Mahajan (Mumbai North Central) and Shiv Sena’s Gajanan Kirtikar (Mumbai North-West, who is now with the opposition Shiv Sena of CM Eknath Shinde) were two of the sitting two-time MPs.

Since 1989, the Shiv Sena candidates for Mumbai North Central have been elected by the Saffron partnership: Vidyadhar Gokhale in 1989, Narayanrao Athawale in 1996, Manohar G. Joshi, the former chief minister and LS Speaker, in 1999, and Poonam P. Mahajan in 2014 and 2019, after the dissolution of the SS-BJP partnership.