Mahayuti Alliance comes back to Power in Maharashtra with a Bang.......

        A clear mandate was given today to the Mahayuti alliance, with the Bharatiya Janata Party making a big gain. By around 6.30 pm, when Thackeray was making his speech, the BJP had won 84 seats and was leading in another 49. The Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar-led NCP also made a massive comeback, leading in 57 and 41 seats, respectively. The other smaller allies include Rashtriya Samaj Paksha (RSP), Republican Party of India (Athawale), Shiv Sangram, and Rayat Kranti Sanghatana. This performance, by their own admission, has outdone the BJP’s performance in the 2014 and 2019 elections, when the “Narendra Modi wave” had swept the national and state political landscapes.

        Earlier in the day, his party’s senior leader Sanjay Raut had posted on X against the results and demanded re-elections, this time on the ballot paper. “The result of Maharashtra is not the voice of the people,” he wrote on social media.

        “This was not a wave but a tsunami. How did we reach here? How did the verdict come out like this? I cannot make sense of this,” said an Uddhav Thackeray. His party, Shiv Sena (UBT), had won 16 seats by 6.30 pm, with a lead in another four. For Thackeray’s party, which contested 89 seats and managed to retain only 22% of total seats, this was a struggle for existence.