MNS edges out NCP to emerge third largest party in vote share

Mumbai, Feb 12 (UNI) Raj Thackeray's newly-floated political outfit Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) has emerged as the third largest party after the Congress and Shiv Sena in terms of number of votes polled in the recently concluded Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) elections.

Even though Congress lost out to the Shiv Sena-BJP combine to capture power in Asia's largest civic body, it polled 10,19,152 votes as compared to 8,75,366 votes polled by the Shiv Sena.

Congress contested on all the 227 seats while Shiv Sena contested on 155.

Sena's alliance partner BJP, which contested 72 seats, got 3,35,392 votes, according to the election data published here.

NCP, which contested 212 seats on its own after pulling out of the seat sharing talks with Congress, was placed in the fourth position polling 4,31,040 votes.

MNS, which contested its first election in Mumbai, polled 4,69,335 votes.

RPI contested 83 seats and bagged 63,088 votes, BSP contested 126 seats and polled 56,023 votes. Samajwadi party contested 79 seats and got 1,55,647 votes.

There were 1,201 candidates who were contesting as Independents and they polled 4,58,069 votes.

There were a total of 2,376 candidates for the 227 seats and the total number of votes polled were 38,63,112 out of the 84,88,536 voters. The vote percentage this year was 45.5 per cent.

UNI