Mumbai: Within the run-up to the much-delayed civic polls anticipated to be held right here subsequent 12 months, Bharatiya Janata Celebration (BJP) Monday appointed MLA Ameet Satam as the brand new president of its Mumbai unit. The appointment seems to have CM Devendra Fadnavis’s stamp of approval.

Satam replaces Ashish Shelar, who completes three years within the submit in his second stint as Mumbai BJP chief this month. Shelar can also be a minister within the Mahayuti authorities, comprising the BJP, Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Celebration (NCP). He holds the data know-how and cultural affairs portfolios. 

In Satam’s appointment, BJP has opted for an urbane, Marathi-speaking face to guide the celebration into the BMC polls, fairly like his predecessor, to tackle the rival Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena (UBT). 

Of the overall 36 Meeting constituencies in Mumbai Suburban and Mumbai Metropolis, BJP at the moment holds 15, highest amongst all events. Nonetheless, many conventional Marathi-speaking pockets went with the Sena (UBT) in final 12 months’s Meeting polls. Of the 20 seats the Thackeray-led celebration received in Maharashtra, 10 had been in Mumbai. These had been Worli, Shivadi, Byculla, Mahim, Vikhroli, Versova, Dindoshi, Vandre (East), Jogeshwari East and Kalina.

Within the run-up to the BMC polls too, Sena (UBT) is vociferously pushing its authentic “sons of the soil” agenda in Mumbai and the BJP wished a management that might counter it simply as aggressively. There are additionally indications of the estranged Thackeray cousins, Uddhav and Raj, probably becoming a member of forces for the civic polls with a marketing campaign centred across the considerations of Mumbai’s Marathi-speaking inhabitants.

Talking to reporters after his appointment, Satam stated, “Between 1997 and 2022 (when the undivided Shiv Sena dominated BMC), there was inordinate corruption within the civic physique. Some persons are additionally making an attempt to vary the color of Mumbai for their very own positive factors.” Satam was alluding to the Shiv Sena (UBT)’s alliance with Congress and the electoral assist it obtained from the Muslim neighborhood throughout the Lok Sabha and Meeting polls final 12 months. 

“We’ll work to carry prosperity and safety in Mumbai,” Satam stated, including that the Mumbai BJP unit beneath his management would work to copy Fadnavis’s efforts to fast-track growth in Mumbai during the last 11 years on the municipal stage.

Through the earlier BMC elections, Shelar had led the celebration as Mumbai BJP president. The celebration recorded its best-ever efficiency within the civic physique polls, clinching 82 of Mumbai’s 277 wards, simply two in need of the then undivided Shiv Sena beneath Uddhav Thackeray. 

In June 2019, Shelar was given a ministerial berth within the then Fadnavis-led authorities, following which the celebration gave the cost of Mumbai BJP to MLA Mangal Prabhat Lodha. In August 2022, months after the BMC normal physique’s time period lapsed in March, and there have been talks of the civic physique heading for elections someday quickly, BJP re-appointed Shelar to the submit, primarily to successfully tackle the Thackeray-led undivided Shiv Sena. 

Final 12 months, Shelar was inducted as a minister within the Fadnavis-led Mahayuti authorities and a change of management within the Mumbai unit was on the playing cards. Atul Bhatkhalkar, a BJP MLA from Mumbai and functionary of the state BJP unit, informed ThePrint, “It’s nearly a like-for-like substitute in some methods. The celebration has given an informed Marathi face to guide us into the civic election. He additionally has respectable relations with different Mahayuti events.”

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Thackeray critic, Fadnavis’s stamp of approval 

Ameet Satam is a three-time MLA from the Andheri West constituency, which he has been representing within the Meeting since 2014.

He determined to enter politics full time in 2004, quitting his company job at Tata Teleservices the place he labored as a senior government within the human assets division.

Even throughout his stint within the company sector, Satam was a neighborhood BJP employee and took up a number of comparatively smaller organisational tasks. After he stop his company job, he took up varied roles, from that of an government assistant to late BJP stalwart Gopinath Munde to taking cost of the BJP youth wing for the Mumbai area as its president.

He grew to become a corporator in 2012 and an MLA in 2014.

As corporator and later MLA, Satam persistently pushed for the event and beautification of various pockets in his constituency such because the cleanup of Juhu seaside or restoration of Gilbert Hill, a 200-ft Mesozoic period marvel within the coronary heart of Mumbai that has suffered because of neglect, encroachments and decay. Satam additionally aggressively took on the Thackeray-led Sena. Final 12 months, when the campaigning for the Lok Sabha elections was underway, he questioned the alleged presence of 1993 Mumbai blasts convict Iqbal Moosa, who spent 10 years in jail, at a rally of Sena (UBT)’s Amol Kirtikar.

Earlier this 12 months, Satam raised the case of Disha Salian’s loss of life within the Meeting after her father moved the Bombay Excessive Court docket in search of a contemporary probe into her loss of life and the registration of an FIR in opposition to Sena (UBT) MLA Aaditya Thackeray. 

Satam has additionally been persistently elevating allegations of irregularities in works allotted by the BMC throughout the COVID-19 pandemic when Uddhav Thackeray was chief minister.

The newly appointed Mumbai BJP president has at all times shared equation with Fadnavis. In June 2022 when the Shiv Sena cut up, Eknath Shinde grew to become chief minister and the celebration directed Fadnavis to take oath as his deputy regardless of him not being eager on it.

Satam together with MLC Parinay Fuke, a Nagpur-based chief near Fadnavis, put up banners on the Western Categorical Freeway in Mumbai calling Fadnavis “dev manus” (god-like individual).

There are components in Satam’s model of working which can be just like Fadnavis’s. After coming to energy in November final 12 months, when Fadnavis was drawing up plans and pushing his departments to fulfill sure targets within the first 100 days of the Mahayuti authorities, Satam drew up his personal 100-day plan as an MLA, formatted his personal 100-day report card and acquired Fadnavis to launch it on the sidelines of the Meeting’s price range session in March.

Dilip Patel, a former BJP corporator from the Mumbai northwest area, which is seen as Satam’s stronghold, informed ThePrint, “There are a lot of causes for why Ameet Satam is the fitting alternative. BJP attracts its energy from the northwest area in Mumbai. His constituency had a major minority inhabitants. Satam has had company expertise, organisational expertise, he has labored within the civic physique. He can current himself very nicely in a number of languages, together with Sanskrit. And he’s younger, he can carry loads of vitality.”

“The purpose is to have our mayor and to attain that he’s an applicable alternative,” Patel added.

(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)

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