Modi’s Pune visit a booster dose for BJP ahead of crucial civic polls

Prime Minister to inaugurate a number of projects during day-long visit

With elections to 14 civic bodies in Maharashtra, including the cash-rich Mumbai, Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad municipal corporations likely to be held in April, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Pune city on March 6 is expected to give a major boost to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as it gears up to retain its dominance in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad.

In his typically hectic schedule, the PM will be inaugurating the Pune Metro rail – touted as the panacea to the city’s burgeoning traffic woes; unveil a statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj in the main building of Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC); lay the foundation stone of Pune Riverfront Development Project whose objective is to clean and rejuvenate 44 km stretch of the city’s polluted rivers and inaugurate a slew of other development works.    

While he has visited Pune a number of times after becoming Prime Minister, Mr. Modi will be only the second PM to visit the PMC building after Jawaharlal Nehru, who had visited the civic body premises at the time of the 1961 Pune floods.

After Mr. Modi came to power at the Centre in 2014, the BJP had managed to form a government in Maharashtra the same year. It had swept all six seats in urban Pune in the 2014 Maharashtra Assembly election.

Since then, to ensure the BJP’s dominance in the cash-rich PMC and the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC), Mr. Modi had laid the foundation stone of the Pune Metro rail project in December 2016 – just ahead of the crucial 2017 civic polls to the two civic bodies – amid furious political bickering with the Congress and the NCP, who claimed credit for the Metro project.

The BJP then went on to bag an unprecedented 97 of the total 162 seats in the 2017 PMC poll while supplanting the NCP from the PCMC (winning 77 of the 128 seats) in a personal blow to Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader and Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar, who lost control of his Pimpri-Chinchwad stronghold.

The Congress, which once held Pune, has seen a precipitate fall in its fortunes since the BJP’s ascendancy.