Bitter fight for India's biggest Lok Sabha seat

PARTY'S PRESTIGE: Shiv Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray is party's star campaigner in Thane.

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Mumbai: It is viewed as a dress rehearsal for the general elections. But the low-level vituperative campaign makes the by-election from Maharashtra's Thane Lok Sabha constituency, the country's biggest, look like a municipal contest.

The election, occasioned by the death of Shiv Sena MP Prakash Paranjpe three months ago, on Thursday is crucial in many ways.

It will test the strength of two ascendant parties in the state- the Shiv Sena and the NCP. The Sena is making a serious bid to regain lost power while the NCP, in the ruling coalition, wants to be one up on its slightly bigger ally, the Congress.

The two parties could not have had a more ideal battleground than the country’s geographically largest Lok Sabha constituency, comprising six assembly segments in which a whopping 3.5 million voters are expected to exercise their franchise.

The delimitation has vivisected the constituency into 15 assembly and two-and-a-half parliamentary constituencies effective from the next general elections.

Large chunks of the present Thane Lok Sabha constituency including the Thane-Belapur belt and Ulhasnagar have a concentration of industries while an overwhelming majority of voters are white-collared salaried people.

Of the 16 candidates, the fight is essentially between late Prakash Paranjpe's son Anand, jointly fielded by the Shiv Sena and its ally the BJP, and Sanjeev Naik of NCP. In their early 30s, suave and unaccustomed to political jargon, both are bubbling with starry ideas.

Prakash Paranjpe won the 2004 Lok Sabha election against NCP's Vasant Davkhare (deputy chairman of the Maharashtra Legislative Council) by 22,000 votes.

In the Vidhan Sabha elections that followed, the NCP won four of the six assembly segments - Ulhasnagar, Belapur, Ambernath and Murbad - with a much bigger combined margin of 111,000 votes.

In a reversal of the trend three years later, the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance won most of the local self-government elections - Thane, Kalyan, Dombivali and Ulhasnagar. This has made prediction of the outcome difficult though the scales appear tilted in favour of the Shiv Sena.

Riding the crest of Marathi sentiment which his party has whipped up in the run up to the election mainly to counter Maharashtra Nav Nirman Sena's offensive on the issue of 'sons of the soil', Shiv Sena's star campaigner Uddhav Thackeray drew huge crowds to his road-shows and public meetings.

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