The Shiv Sena is on a mission to reclaim Dadar, once the party’s frontier bastion now lost to the breakaway Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. In the 2009 assembly polls, the Sena first lost Dadar (Mahim constituency) to MNS candidate Nitin Sardesai. In the civic polls last year, all six MNS candidates from Dadar-Mahim trumped the Sena to the BMC house.

The scars of the lost battles were deep enough for Sena patriarch Bal Thackeray to express - in his last public speech before he died - that he was distressed the Sena had lost Dadar, the birthplace of the saffron party on June 19, 1966.