Aaditya Thackeray had won Worli with a margin of over 67,000 votes in 2019.
New Delhi:
One of the biggest Sena vs Sena battles in Maharashtra has Aditya Thackeray, son of Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) chief Uddhav Thackeray, in a narrow lead over Milind Deora, the candidate from the Eknath Shinde faction in south Mumbai’s Worli constituency.
As of 10.23 am on Saturday, the younger Thackeray is leading Mr Deora, a former Congress MP who jumped ship and joined the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena in January, by a margin of just 696 votes. According to the Election Commission website, only two rounds of counting – of a total of 17 – has been completed so far.
In the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly polls, Aaditya Thackeray had made his electoral debut from the Worli constituency and emerged victorious with a massive margin of over 67,000 votes.
Follow LIVE coverage of Maharashtra election results
The segment is, however, part of the Mumbai (South) Lok Sabha constituency, which was a stronghold of the Deora family for a very long time. Murli Deora had won the Mumbai (South) seat thrice between 1984 and 1991 and then again in 1998. Milind Deora was then elected the MP from the Congress twice, in 2004 and 2009. The Shiv Sena started winning from there in 2014 and the sitting MP, Arvind Sawant, sided with the Eknath Shinde faction of the party after the split in 2022, and won again this year.
Ahead of the Assembly elections, Mr Deora, who is a Rajya Sabha MP, had said the battle between him and Aaditya Thackeray was not a personal one but added that the Worli MLA and the Uddhav Thackeray faction of the Shiv Sena had failed to develop the constituency.
“It is not a personal battle. I have known Aaditya Thackeray for a long time. The people of Mumbai and Maharashtra had high expectations of him when he came into politics five years ago… But now I think people are tired of speed-breaker politics. The people want Maharashtra to move ahead, that is the objective,” Mr Deora had told NDTV.
