The Congress party in Mumbai suffered a few shocks this Tuesday, if that’s still possible. In quick succession, two high-profile members resigned from the party – Urmila Matondkar, actor and party candidate in the recent Lok Sabha election ended her five-month stay; Kripashankar Singh, former MLA, minister in the state cabinet and party loyalist who consistently travelled to New Delhi every year to wish Sonia Gandhi on her birthday on 9 December.
In Indapur, near Pune, Harshvardhan Patil, former minister in the state cabinet and counted as the face of the youth not long ago, bid the party goodbye. He joined the BJP on Wednesday.
Coming days before the Maharashtra Assembly election’s announcement, and when the BJP and Shiv Sena are on a spree to fill up their carts with imports from the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), the resignations do not bode well for the Congress.
The NCP does not boast of having a robust presence in Mumbai at any time in its 20-year history, but the Congress has had deep bonds and respectable electoral presence in Mumbai, where it was founded 134 years ago.
Congress leaders have appeared sub-regional to an extent that those from south Mumbai rarely, if at all, moved around in the suburbs, and those from the suburbs further demarcated support bases on community or caste lines.