The results of Maharashtra's Legislative Council elections have delivered an uncomfortable message to the ruling Mahayuti alliance and a much-needed boost to the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi, with the opposition bloc winning three of the five seats that went to the polls.
The outcome, confirmed when counting ended on October 29, 2026, has exposed strains inside the ruling alliance, triggered open recrimination between partners, and given the opposition a rare moment of momentum in a state where it has struggled to convert anger against the government into electoral wins.
The five seats at stake were three Graduates' constituencies and two Teachers' constituencies in the 78-member Maharashtra Legislative Council. Polling was held on October 23, 2026. These are not ordinary assembly seats.
Graduates' and Teachers' constituencies have small, specialised electorates made up of registered graduates and teachers, and they are fought very differently from general elections. Every voter has to be identified, tracked and persuaded individually, and second-preference votes can decide a contest when no candidate wins outright on first preferences.
That character of the election is central to understanding why the results have hurt the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in particular, and why the party's own leaders have described the outcome as an eye-opener.
When the final results were declared, the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) had won three seats and the Mahayuti two. The star performer of the election was Sharad Pawar's Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar), or NCP (SP), which won both of the seats it contested — the highest tally for any single party in this round. The Congress won one seat, the BJP won one and the Shiv Sena won one.
The Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), or Shiv Sena (UBT), and the ruling Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) led by Ajit Pawar both finished without a seat.
The single most consequential result was in Nagpur. The Congress retained the Nagpur Division Graduates' constituency, defeating the BJP in a seat the BJP had guarded for decades before losing it to the Congress in 2020. Congress candidate Abhijeet Wanjari was declared the winner after first-preference votes failed to produce a clear winner and second-preference votes were counted.
The contest was closely fought over more than 40 hours of counting, with the lead changing hands repeatedly, according to reports of the count. For the BJP, the defeat was painful for reasons that go beyond one council seat. Nagpur is the home turf of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Union Minister Nitin Gadkari, and it is the headquarters of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
Fadnavis's father, Gangadharrao Fadnavis, had himself won from the constituency, and Gadkari had earlier been a member of the Legislative Council from the same seat. Losing there, for a second consecutive election, was therefore read inside the BJP as a symbolic blow as much as a numerical one.
The embarrassment was compounded by the fate of a social media post by Fadnavis himself. Reports said the Chief Minister had to delete a tweet about the council poll results after the Nagpur outcome turned against the BJP. The episode became a talking point for the opposition, which argued that the BJP had been premature in celebrating.
Earlier, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had posted on social media mocking the Congress for failing to win seats in council elections held across four states, asking how many of 28 seats the Congress had won in elections held using ballot papers. The Congress's eventual victory in Nagpur gave it an answer it was eager to use, and party leaders and allies argued that the result showed the limits of such taunts.
The Congress leadership attributed the Nagpur win to careful, ground-level work rather than to any single dramatic factor. Party leaders said they had decentralised responsibility to young and enthusiastic workers, identified double voters, planned meticulously for second-preference votes, and countered what they described as a divisive, caste-based campaign by the BJP.
Congress leader Atul Londhe said the party had been alert to internal differences within the BJP and had planned for second preferences from the start. He said the party's candidate had stayed in touch with voters throughout his six-year term and had worked on schemes for them, while the campaign had used social media and made inroads in urban areas.
Londhe also said the Congress had identified more than 8,000 double voters and brought them to the notice of the Chief Electoral Officer, mapping dubious entries on the rolls in order to keep pressure on the administration.
Maharashtra Congress president Harshwardhan Sapkal said the results reflected wider anger against the ruling dispensation. He also argued that money had played a large role in the Teachers' constituency contests, saying that a great deal of financial activity had taken place there and that the Congress had found it impossible to compete on those terms.
That complaint points to a long-standing feature of Teachers' constituency elections, where small electorates and intense local networks can make contests expensive and unpredictable.
Inside the BJP, the post-mortem began almost immediately, and it was unusually frank. Party leaders admitted that cadres and local leaders were disillusioned and had not put in the effort the election demanded.
One BJP leader was quoted as saying there had been a general attitude that senior leaders Narendra Modi and Devendra Fadnavis would deliver the result on their own, and that this was not how the party had traditionally worked in Graduates' elections, where each voter must be tracked carefully and local leadership must work hard. The leader pointed to rebellion within the party as a factor that hurt it badly, particularly in Nagpur.
Another BJP leader, Keshav Upadhye, called for introspection by the party.
The rebellion in Nagpur was a case in point. The BJP's former member of the Legislative Council and senior leader Anil Sole had raised the flag of rebellion after the party nominated Sudhakar Kohale instead of him. Efforts by senior leaders to placate Sole failed until Fadnavis intervened and persuaded him to withdraw, after Sole had publicly complained that senior, loyal leaders were being undermined in favour of new faces.
Fadnavis gave an assurance that old hands would be included, and Sole withdrew, clearing the way for Kohale. But the episode left wounds, and the party's own assessment is that the internal dissent damaged its campaign in its stronghold.
The strain was not confined to the BJP. The results led to an open rift between alliance partners who had already been unhappy since seat distribution, which they had described as unfair. Allies accused the BJP of an arrogant and dominant attitude in the allocation of seats.
The Shiv Sena, angered at being blamed by the BJP for the defeat, hit back by accusing the BJP of a lack of coordination from the beginning. One Sena leader even suggested that Eknath Shinde should be made Chief Minister, arguing that the result reflected people's anger against the state leadership. The BJP, in turn, described its alliance partner as greedy and accused it of sacrificing the interests of the alliance.
Shinde himself said the Shiv Sena had always worked to respect the alliance. The Shiv Sena had won no seat in the previous election, but this time it won a seat after the winner of the 2020 election switched sides and joined the party, which then fielded him successfully.
The ruling NCP had a disappointing election of its own. It fought only one seat and lost it. Senior leaders had expressed apprehension about the party leadership after the BJP did not give it the Pune seat it had sought.
The party had wanted Pune and Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, both seats it regarded as its sitting seats, but the BJP kept Pune for itself and gave Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar to the NCP, where it fought against Sharad Pawar's NCP (SP) and lost. NCP leader Chhagan Bhujbal said the decision showed voters distancing themselves from the party and that introspection was needed, a day after another senior leader, Praful Patel, had also called for introspection.
For the opposition, the significance of the result lies less in the arithmetic of the council and more in what it signals about organisation and morale. The MVA won all three Graduates' seats that went to the polls, while the Mahayuti won the two Teachers' seats.
Shiv Sena (UBT) MP Sanjay Raut argued that graduates, who voted in these elections, had rejected the BJP and its allies and defeated them using ballot papers, and he stressed that alliance discipline had not been followed on either side. He pointed out that the Amravati Teachers' constituency should have gone to his party, since no MVA ally held it as a sitting member, yet the Congress fielded a candidate there and the Shiv Sena's Kiran Sarnaik won it.
The result in Amravati therefore illustrates the messy reality of alliance politics in these elections, where partners fielded candidates against each other even while claiming a common front.
(Reporting based on The Hindu and UNI.)