My Karmabhoomi”: Milind Deora On Worli Battle vs Aaditya Thackeray

Mumbai: 

Shinde Sena leader Milind Deora spoke to NDTV Monday – over dosa and some chai, a welcome break from a busy election schedule – about next week’s Maharashtra Assembly poll contest against Aaditya Thackeray of the Thackeray Shiv Sena faction, and underlined his ‘local’ credentials to voters. Mr Deora will contest the Worli seat in south Mumbai – a current stronghold of the Thackeray Sena faction and won convincingly by Aaditya Thackeray in 2019.

“For me… I am a south Mumbaikar. I was born here, I live here, I work here. This is my janmbabhoomi and karmabhoomi. No doubt Aaditya Thackeray is an important leader of the opposition and has been MLA for five years. So, in some ways, this is a political challenge.”

“We wanted to mount a serious challenge for this seat… to raise the stakes. We did think about giving the ticket a local leader, but the decision was finally taken that I should contest. It was felt that giving the seat to a local person can swing both ways. What could have happened is that the opposition could say, ‘it is an unknown person’ and there could be conspiracies.”

The fight for Worli, therefore, is set to be a high-profile battle.