History of Mumbai
After the Partition of India on 15 August 1947, over 100,000 Sindhi refugees from the newly created Pakistan were relocated in the military camps five kilometres from Kalyan in the Maharashta Region. It was converted into a township in 1949, and named Ulhasnagar by the then Governor-General of India, C. Rajagopalachari. In April 1950, Greater Bombay District came into existence with the merger of Bombay Suburbs and Bombay City. It spanned an area of and inhabited 2,339,000 of people in 1951. The Municipal Corporation limits were extended up to Jogeshwari along the Western Railway and Bhandup along the Central Railway. This limit was further extended in February 1957 up to Dahisar along the Western Railway and Mulund on the Central Railway. In the 1955 "Lok Sabha" discussions, when Bombay State was being re-organised along linguistic lines into the states of Maharashtra and Gujarat. But the States Reorganisation Committee recommended a bi-lingual state for Maharashtra-Gujarat, with Bombay as its capital. However, the Samyukta Maharashtra movement opposed this, and insisted that Bombay native of Marathi be declared the capital of Maharashtra. The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay was established in 1958 at Powai, a northern suburb of Bombay. Following protests by the Samyukta Maharashtra movement in which 105 people were killed by police firing, Maharashtra State was formed with Bombay as its capital on 1 May 1960. Flora Fountain was renamed Hutatma Chowk ("Martyr's Square") as a memorial to the Samyukta Maharashtra movement.
Politics of Maharashtra
The politics of Maharashtra since its inception in 1960 and also of predecessor states such as Bombay has been dominated by the Indian National Congress party. Maharashtra became a bastion of the Congress party producing stalwarts such as Yashwantrao Chavan, Vasantdada Patil, Vasantrao Naik and Shankarrao Chavan. Sharad Pawar has been a towering personality in the state and National politics for nearly forty years. During his career, he has split the Congress twice with significant consequences for the state politics. The Congress party enjoyed a near unchallenged dominance of the political landscape until 1995 when the Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) secured an overwhelming majority in the state to form a coalition government. After his second parting from the Congress party in 1999, Sharad Pawar formed the NCP but joined a Congress led coalition to form the state government after the 1999 Assembly elections.Prithviraj Chavan of the Congress party was the last Chief Minister of Maharashtra under the Congress-NCP alliance that ruled until 2014.
For the 2014 assembly polls, the two alliances between the NCP and Congress and between the BJP and Shiv Sena respectively broke down over seat allocations. In the election, the largest number of seats went to the Bharatiya Janata Party, with 122 seats. The BJP initially formed a minority government under Devendra Fadnavis but Shiv Sena has, as of December 2014, entered the Government and therefore the Government now enjoys a comfortable majority in the Maharashtra Vidhansabha.