Maharashtra: Another fixed election on the cards

Maharashtra goes to the polls on 2 December to elect 246 municipal councils and 42 nagar panchayats, with results to be announced on 3 December. Meanwhile, campaigning is already in full swing for the long-delayed Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) elections slated for January 2026.

All good? Not quite. Once again, an election appears set to proceed on the basis of flawed voter lists. The Opposition has been vociferous in flagging the discrepancies, while the ruling coalition has shown little or no interest in addressing them — an indifference that speaks volumes.

The draft electoral list prepared by the state election commission was published on 20 November. Reports suggest that the CEO has admitted to ‘glitches’ that need to be set right. An understatement if ever there was, considering the staggering scale of errors pointed out by the Opposition.

Aaditya Thackeray of the Shiv Sena (UBT) flagged “massive irregularities”, alleging that a million names have appeared “twice, thrice and, in some cases, seven times” in the draft list. Addressing a press conference in Mumbai on 21 November, Aaditya Thackeray re-emphasised a deliberate campaign of ‘vote chori’.

As many as 8.32 lakh voters apparently reside in 26,319 households; as many as 40–50 people are shown registered as living at single addresses, while some households have apparently been listed with as many as 1,000 voters. In addition, seven lakh voters in the electoral roll have no house number. “This is a fraud, not an error,” he said.

“In some places, the voter list has… shifted an entire Assembly constituency. This is nothing but vote chori. If it is incompetence by the ECI, they must be sacked. If it is on purpose, as we see it, the ECI must be charged for preventing voters from exercising their constitutional right,” Thackeray added.

BJP leader and state revenue minister Chandrashekhar Bawankule acknowledged duplication of voters throughout Maharashtra, including in Nagpur, adding that voter lists cannot be cleaned up without an SIR-like exercise. (Significantly, Maharashtra is not on the list of states where the ECI is conducting an SIR.)

Congress MLA Jyoti Gaikwad posted on X: ‘Across Dharavi, 6,000 to 10,000 voters per ward have been quietly shifted from their original ward to some other ward altogether. Entire neighbourhoods like Social Nagar, for example, have been moved to distant wards... If this were a small mix up between adjoining wards, it could be understood. But this is systematic shifting to far-off wards.’

The intention, she asserted, is clear. ‘Confuse voters. Create chaos. Ensure people reach their usual booths on polling day only to discover their names [are] missing.’

Going through the lists page by page, the Congress found that 7,638 voters who were always on the voter list for Ward 28 have been shifted to Ward 29. Similar shifts, Gaikwad alleged, are widespread.

Congress party spokesperson Atul Londhe Patil lodged a complaint in Andheri, where blank election photo identity cards (EPICs) were found hidden in the toilet of an under-construction apartment. While the video he posted generated the usual allegations and counter-allegations with trolls claiming the Congress must have printed and planted the cards, no investigation was deemed necessary (at the time of filing this report).

Sharad Pawar, Uddhav Thackeray and MNS president Raj Thackeray have also raised the issue of bogus voters, alleging that while there are 90 lakh bogus voters across the state, nine lakh fake voters have been added in Mumbai alone.

The state election commission is yet to react to any of the allegations, claiming to have added 18 lakh voters in the past seven months and deleted over four lakh voters.

Neither has it extended the time limit for filing objections from seven days to the requested 21 days. “If the ECI doesn’t extend the time for filing objections and doesn’t accept our objections after verification, we will clearly know the BJP and ECI have fixed this election together. The Election Commission is a circus, no longer the neutral agency that held free and fair elections,” declared Aaditya Thackeray.

Soliciting votes on religious grounds or buying voters by paying them in cash or kind are blatant electoral malpractices and violations of the model code of conduct. Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray was debarred from participating in elections for six years for declaring at public rallies that he did not need Muslim votes. The case has long receded from public memory and today such statements are accepted as the ‘new normal’.

So naturally no one, apart from the Opposition, batted an eye when deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar spelled it out — he had the funds, the people had the votes; unless they gave him their votes, he would find it difficult to give them the funds.

The demand that action be taken against him by the Election Commission fell on deaf ears (but of course). Instead, Pawar was supported by the chief minister Devendra Fadnavis himself, who saw no fault in the statement and dismissed it as campaign-talk.

Far from malpractice, Pawar’s statement, Fadnavis insisted, was quite innocuous actually, since he was merely suggesting that development would follow if the party won. What we want, he added, is the “development of the entire state”. Yeah, right.