Mumbai: In the run-up to the much-delayed civic polls expected to be held here next year, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Monday appointed MLA Ameet Satam as the new president of its Mumbai unit. The appointment appears to have CM Devendra Fadnavis’s stamp of approval.
Satam replaces Ashish Shelar, who completes three years in the post in his second stint as Mumbai BJP chief this month. Shelar is also a minister in the Mahayuti government, comprising the BJP, Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). He holds the information technology and cultural affairs portfolios.
Announcing Satam as the party’s pick as Mumbai BJP president, Fadnavis told reporters Monday, “He is known as a studious and aggressive MLA. Specifically, he is well acquainted with the issues of Mumbai and has the ability to find solutions to them. I am confident that under his leadership the BJP will preserve its advantage in Mumbai and once again, in the BMC elections too, the Mahayuti will come to power.”
In Satam’s appointment, BJP has opted for an urbane, Marathi-speaking face to lead the party into the BMC polls, quite like his predecessor, to take on the rival Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena (UBT).
Of the total 36 Assembly constituencies in Mumbai Suburban and Mumbai City, BJP currently holds 15, highest among all parties. However, many traditional Marathi-speaking pockets went with the Sena (UBT) in last year’s Assembly polls. Of the 20 seats the Thackeray-led party won in Maharashtra, 10 were in Mumbai. These were Worli, Shivadi, Byculla, Mahim, Vikhroli, Versova, Dindoshi, Vandre (East), Jogeshwari East and Kalina.
In the run-up to the BMC polls too, Sena (UBT) is vociferously pushing its original “sons of the soil” agenda in Mumbai and the BJP wanted a leadership that could counter it just as aggressively. There are also indications of the estranged Thackeray cousins, Uddhav and Raj, potentially joining forces for the civic polls with a campaign centred around the concerns of Mumbai’s Marathi-speaking population.
Speaking to reporters after his appointment, Satam said, “Between 1997 and 2022 (when the undivided Shiv Sena ruled BMC), there has been inordinate corruption in the civic body. Some people are also trying to change the colour of Mumbai for their own gains.” Satam was alluding to the Shiv Sena (UBT)’s alliance with Congress and the electoral support it received from the Muslim community during the Lok Sabha and Assembly polls last year.
“We will work to bring prosperity and security in Mumbai,” Satam said, adding that the Mumbai BJP unit under his leadership would work to replicate Fadnavis’s efforts to fast-track development in Mumbai over the last 11 years at the municipal level.
During the previous BMC elections, Shelar had led the party as Mumbai BJP president. The party recorded its best-ever performance in the civic body polls, clinching 82 of Mumbai’s 277 wards, just two short of the then undivided Shiv Sena under Uddhav Thackeray.
In June 2019, Shelar was given a ministerial berth in the then Fadnavis-led government, following which the party gave the charge of Mumbai BJP to MLA Mangal Prabhat Lodha. In August 2022, months after the BMC general body’s term lapsed in March, and there were talks of the civic body heading for elections sometime soon, BJP re-appointed Shelar to the post, mainly to effectively take on the Thackeray-led undivided Shiv Sena.
Last year, Shelar was inducted as a minister in the Fadnavis-led Mahayuti government and a change of leadership in the Mumbai unit was on the cards. Atul Bhatkhalkar, a BJP MLA from Mumbai and functionary of the state BJP unit, told ThePrint, “It is almost a like-for-like replacement in some ways. The party has given an educated Marathi face to lead us into the civic election. He also has decent relations with other Mahayuti parties.”
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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 in the Assembly since 2014.
He decided to enter politics full time in 2004, quitting his corporate job at Tata Teleservices where he worked as a senior executive in the human resources department.
Even during his stint in the corporate sector, Satam was a local BJP worker and took up several relatively smaller organisational responsibilities. After he quit his corporate job, he took up various roles, from that of an executive assistant to late BJP stalwart Gopinath Munde to taking charge of the BJP youth wing for the Mumbai region as its president.
He became a corporator in 2012 and an MLA in 2014.
As corporator and later MLA, Satam consistently pushed for the development and beautification of different pockets in his constituency such as the cleanup of Juhu beach or restoration of Gilbert Hill, a 200-ft Mesozoic era marvel in the heart of Mumbai that has suffered due to neglect, encroachments and decay. Satam also aggressively took on the Thackeray-led Sena. Last year, 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 year, Satam raised the case of Disha Salian’s death in the Assembly after her father moved the Bombay High Court seeking a fresh probe into her death and the registration of an FIR against Sena (UBT) MLA Aaditya Thackeray.
Satam has also been consistently raising allegations of irregularities in works allotted by the BMC during the COVID-19 pandemic when Uddhav Thackeray was chief minister.
The newly appointed Mumbai BJP president has always shared a good equation with Fadnavis. In June 2022 when the Shiv Sena split, Eknath Shinde became chief minister and the party directed Fadnavis to take oath as his deputy despite him not being keen on it.
Satam along with MLC Parinay Fuke, a Nagpur-based leader close to Fadnavis, put up banners on the Western Express Highway in Mumbai calling Fadnavis “dev manus” (god-like person).
There are elements in Satam’s style of working that are similar to Fadnavis’s. After coming to power in November last year, when Fadnavis was drawing up plans and pushing his departments to meet certain targets in the first 100 days of the Mahayuti government, Satam drew up his own 100-day plan as an MLA, formatted his own 100-day report card and got Fadnavis to release it on the sidelines of the Assembly’s budget session in March.
Dilip Patel, a former BJP corporator from the Mumbai northwest region, which is seen as Satam’s stronghold, told ThePrint, “There are many reasons for why Ameet Satam is the right choice. BJP draws its strength from the northwest region in Mumbai. His constituency had a significant minority population. Satam has had corporate experience, organisational experience, he has worked in the civic body. He can present himself very well in multiple languages, including Sanskrit. And he is young, he can bring a lot of energy.”
“The goal is to have our mayor and to achieve that he is an appropriate choice,” Patel added.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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