The Bharatiya Janata Party continues its march towards unsuccessful journey of conquering Nalasopara Constituency (132) by announcing its candidate as Rajan Naik for the upcoming Assembly Elections 2024. There is gloom spread across Nalasopara since the candidature was announced and barring a handful of party workers there were zero celebrations in this entire constituency. Not even 200 party workers assembled around the office of Rajan Naik when his candidature was announced a couple of days ago. He will be contesting against the candidate of Bahujan Vikas Aaghadi (BVA), UBT faction and a couple of Independents.
The BVA MLA Kshitij Thakur has captured this turf consecutively for 3 terms since 2009. He has won all the 3 assembly elections since Nalasopara constituency came into existence in 2009. He defeated Shirish Chavan of Shiv Sena in 2009, and became the youngest MLA of Maharashtra (26 years), then defeated Rajan Naik in 2014 and then defeated Pradeep Sharma, which was the much hyped election, who lost miserably. We have to understand that the last two losses were during the Modi-Wave! And now after the Lok Sabha drubbing the BJP had to face and the way minority has been voting, this elections looks like done and dusted.
Well, but this is not about Kshitij Thakur but about Rajan Naik, who lost to the former hands-down in 2014 and a lot of them are unhappy that he was chosen again after a decade. Naik is a senior party worker of the BJP in Palghar district and was also the District President for quite some time.
The data for the last 15 years (3 assembly results) states that the BJP or the Shiv Sena have lost to a margin of around 40 to 50 thousand votes. This loss margin has never decreased in the last 3 assembly elections. Though the population of Nalasopara and its voters has increased drastically from around 3 lakhs 50 thousand in 2009 to around 5 lakh 19 thousand as of 2019 elections, the loss margin has always been around 40 to 50 thousand votes.
The Nalasopara BJP has drastically failed to gain ground in this constituency and the state leadership has also failed miserably on this front, ignoring them completely. The Nalasopara BJP unit was never seen as a strong face amidst the hobnobbing of BJP state leadership with the Thakur’s (BVA) whenever they visited Vasai Taluka. As it is the state leadership visited very seldom and even then, they made it a point to meet the Thakur’s at their residence. This has always been seen as a demotivating factor for the ground level party worker who gave up their fight after watching the camaraderie between the two opponent party’s. The Nalasopara population kept increasing but the party workers never increased and hence the loss margin would be impossible to breach.
The Nalasopara BJP has always been found napping while the footpaths were encroached, thousands of illegal constructions mushroomed, Hygiene was a concern, overnight slums cropped up, illegal hawker menace continued, people dint have space to walk on roads, traffic jam crossed its peak and pollution issues went unanswered. The BJP was simply not focussing on all these issues and didnt even clear one check box when we speak about the issues mentioned above. By the way, these are the issues faced by Nalasopara citizens during the 15 year tenure of the BVA, which we shall discuss in the next article, once their candidate is announced, for her/him to brief of the challenges ahead. The BJP could not even conduct Job Fairs at regular intervals to make their presence felt or even conduct out reach programs to attract the youth or the first time voters.
Though, there would be some positive impact due to Ladki Bahin Yojna, Ayushman Bharat Yojna and several other schemes but these are state and centre driven schemes. This would help the BJP gain some votes in Nalasopara but to assume that this will fill the vacuum of 40 thousand votes would be a bit overconfident.
The BJP had a good chance of kick starting the dream to conquer Palghar if the rumours of Senior BVA leader Rajeev Patil (Nana) joining the BJP were true. Patil is a visionary and has a strong ground presence in entire Palghar district and would have single handedly wrestled this Nalasopara constituency and tilted the voting percentage in BJP’s favor. But this just ended up as a rumour or the if true, then the BJP just failed to capitalise on this show of optics.
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