Sada Sarvankar had to fight two powerful forces — senior ally BJP and Raj Thackeray — to remain in the battle for the Mahim Assembly seat.

The BJP had mounted pressure on Sarvankar, candidate for chief minister Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena, to withdraw and back Amit Thackeray, son of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief. But he refused.

Now, whether he secures a third straight term from Mahim — and fourth overall, having won from Dadar in 2004 — hinges on how solidly the “Marathi manoos” back him.

Mahim lies in the heart of Mumbai where Bal Thackeray founded the Shiv Sena to champion the cause of the “Marathi manoos”. The constituency presents an example of how the BJP’s ascent to dominance in the state has left factions of this regional party struggling for survival.

Sarvankar, a candidate of the BJP-led, ruling Mahayuti alliance, is pitted against Mahesh Sawant of Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT), which is part of the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi, and debutant Amit Thackeray of the MNS.

The BJP had wanted Sarvankar to withdraw and turn Mahim into a safe seat for Amit to try and please Raj and secure his help in splitting the Uddhav faction’s votes elsewhere. State BJP leaders went ahead and declared their support for Raj’s son and not Sarvankar, the candidate of their ally.

“I am the sitting MLA here, and the MNS candidate was announced after my party had already declared my name and I had filed my nomination,” Sarvankar told The Telegraph.

“I went and told my leader Eknath Shinde that I am not withdrawing. I explained that Amit Thackeray would not be able to win the seat.”

Shinde told Sarvankar to go and meet Raj and explain everything to him.

“Raj Thackeray is my neighbour. I tried to meet him but he refused. Now the people will decide who deserves to be their MLA,” Sarvankar said, before leaving his central election office in Mahim to hit the campaign trail.

A poster of MNS leader Raj Thackeray in Mahim JP Yadav

The BJP has now reversed its stand and announced its support for Sarvankar. But the Marathis, who make up more than half the voters in the constituency, stand divided between the three Sena faction candidates.

This tangled web is not confined to Mahim but spread across most of the nearly 50 Assembly constituencies in the wider Mumbai metropolitan region, once the turf of the undivided Shiv Sena. The jumble is all the more knotted in about 25 seats where the MNS too has fielded candidates.

“There is a ‘Maha Confusion’ here. All the three main candidates are strong. Whoever gets the majority of Marathi votes will win,” said Sadashiv Patil, who runs a grocery shop in Mahim market.

The BJP’s behind-the-scenes machinations to split Uddhav’s Sena in June 2022 and topple the Congress-Shiv Sena-NCP government he led have left Maharashtra politics scarred.

The general election this year was supposed to decide which of the two parties — Shinde’s or Uddhav’s — was the “real Shiv Sena” but the matter remained unresolved with both picking up an almost equal number of seats. Shinde’s party won seven Lok Sabha seats while Uddhav’s bagged nine.

Now the Assembly polls are expected to clear the confusion over which party enjoys bigger support in this economic hub of the country and can claim ownership of Bal Thackeray’s nativist political legacy.

The battle lines have been drawn with Shinde, who broke away from Uddhav’s Sena with 39 MLAs and tied up with the BJP to form the government in 2022, choosing all-out confrontation. He has fielded the former Union minister and defector from the Congress, Milind Deora, against Uddhav’s son Aditya Thackeray from Worli.

Here, Aditya will also have to contend with Sandeep Deshpande of the MNS. The Uddhav faction has fielded the nephew of Shinde’s mentor Anand Dighe from the chief minister’s turf of the Thane region.

While Shinde had walked away with most of Uddhav’s MLAs in 2022, most of the cadres — the Shiv Sainiks — had stood by Uddhav.

But with the finances at his disposal now as chief minister, Shinde has over the past two years managed to lure away a sizeable chunk of the cadres.

“It remains to be seen whether the remaining Shiv Sainiks’ loyalty to the Thackeray family endures or crumbles before Shinde’s money power,” a BJP manager in Mumbai said, indicating that Shinde’s team was offering huge sums to win over the rest of Uddhav’s cadres.

The bigger question, however, is who stands to benefit more from this ugly tussle between the Sena factions.

Answering the question, a key BJP strategist in Mumbai said: “If we look closely at the candidates at each of the nearly 50 seats in the wider Mumbai region, we find that the presence of the MNS helps the BJP more than our Shiv Sena partner.”

The BJP, contesting more than half the 288 seats as part of the Mahayuti, is looking to emerge as the largest party and stake claim to the chief minister’s chair.

It had rewarded Shinde with the top job despite being the larger partner two years ago, but seems no longer in the mood to extend the same courtesy for another term.