43 Is The Number: BJP’s quest to retain NDA’s 2019 Maharashtra tally

Why is the BJP is still targeting the opposition leaders and how the chessboard in Maharashtra looks now?

In the twilight of his political career, former Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan has hung his boots in the Congress, the party he was born and grew up in, to join the Modi bandwagon, convinced of the Prime Minister’s ‘Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas’ slogan as a worthwhile mission.

With that he also distanced himself from his father Shankarrao Chavan’s political legacy in his home district of Nanded.

Problem is, Chavan’s enlightenment came a bit too late in the day. It’s difficult not to ignore the fact that his decision to join the BJP in a very low-key affair in Mumbai came days after his name propped up again in connection with the Adarsh scam in the White Paper published by the BJP government at the Centre.

That the former CM, who did not live up to expectations and emerge as a pan-Maharashtra face, could not see the Congress returning to power in the Centre and the state on its own anytime soon – a correct political assessment – can be said to have made the right choice for himself. After all, a political leader entrenched in the business and institutional maze living outside power is like a fish out of water. Ask Ajit Pawar.

But this piece is not about Chavan or his reasons to desert the Congress, it’s about why the BJP is still targeting the opposition leaders and how the chessboard in Maharashtra looks now.

Let’s go back to the numbers.

BJP’s Mission 43

Maharashtra has 48 Lok Sabha seats, next only to UP’s 80. Between them, Bihar, West Bengal and Maharashtra share 130 Lok Sabha seats, of which the NDA had won 100 seats in 2019 (39 in Bihar, 43 in Maharashtra, 18 in West Bengal), while the Congress won merely four – 2 in WB, 1 in Bihar and 1 in Maharashtra. Along with Karnataka, where the BJP won 25 of the 28 seats in 2019 (the Congress won only one there), the bloc of Bihar, WB and Maharashtra, form a very, very significant electoral battleground for 2024, especially for the BJP. These four states add to 158 seats.

For, not only does it need to maintain its strike rate, it needs to retain its phenomenal vote share of 2019. Notwithstanding Modi’s reigning popularity within the media and a large voter base, the BJP knows 2024 isn’t 2014 or 2019. A slight change on the ground will lead to big changes.

The BJP's gigantic problem is this: In Maharashtra, it must defend its 2019 tally of 43 Lok Sabha seats in order to keep Modi in the saddle, and it must do so without a pan-state leader and with a large anti-incumbency and public anger against the Shinde-Fadnavis-Pawar government.

Polarised Polity

All said and done, Devendra Fadnavis isn’t a popular mass leader by any imagination. At best, he is an astute and often wily leader who can remorselessly resort to political machinations from the seat of authority, just as the two top BJP leaders in the country will order him to do.

Eknath Shinde failed to garner Maratha votes. Enter Ajit Pawar, and it hasn’t helped either.

Its two gambles – engineering the splits in Shiv Sena and the NCP – has failed to bring the BJP close to the 2019 number in Lok Sabha, in its own assessment. And it has reached a saturation point where it can’t improve its seats tally by triggering splits or any further defections.

Meanwhile, a large chunk of anti-BJP and anti-Modi voters have unified on the ground, in its internal assessment, just as the pro-BJP and pro-Modi voters have polarised on the one side.

This massively polarised vote has not had any electoral test in the state, because after 2019, there have been no local body elections in Maharashtra; certainly, none after the splits in the Sena and NCP. So even the BJP does not know how the voters would behave, come the elections.

Add to it a few social and economic factors: agrarian distress is deepening; the sugar sector has been without any leader or voice and is in crisis; productive jobs are hard to come by; Maratha protests in favour of reservations haven’t ebbed; the Maratha versus OBC rift is getting wider and both the communities are equally unhappy with the state government’s overall handling of the issue.

What then are the BJP’s options in Maharashtra to keep the public perception in its favour?

For the looming 2024 elections, it needs to do something immediately to further dent the Maha Vikas Aghadi, the multi-party alliance of the Congress, the Sharad Pawar faction of the NCP, Uddhav’s Sena, the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi, the Left parties, and the smaller sub-regional players, and hope that it could reach closer to retaining its 2019 joint-tally of 43 seats.

In the long run, it can win back Uddhav’s Shiv Sena, something difficult but not impossible in the future.

Why Chavan?

Chavan's entry does not change any arithmetic in Nanded since the BJP had convincingly won that seat in 2019 by defeating him. For the BJP’s state leaders, including Fadnavis, it’s a similar awkward moment when it had had to accommodate a rival stalwart against whom they went all over the town trumpeting their corruption charges – irrigation scandal in the case of Ajit Pawar, and Adarsh Housing scam in Chavan’s case, and yet they are doing what they are.

The BJP hopes the defections from its fold would dent the morale of the Congress rank and file, push for more grassroots defections all over the state, and break the confidence of the non-BJP voter. Chavan’s defection to the BJP must therefore be seen in line with this limited objective. So should the defections of Milind Deora and Baba Siddiqui; both these leaders don’t bring any substantive vote to the already saturated base of the BJP. The counter risk is to lose its long held OBC base, because the BJP has had to sideline a number of its own aspiring OBC leaders.

While Chavan needs a political shelter to safeguard his business and political interests – almost along the lines of Narayan Rane et al, the BJP needs to continue stirring the political pot by creating a perception that the Congress remains the weakest link in the opposition alliance. The element of surprise and suddenness is therefore critical in every such political defection.

That’s a script written in New Delhi, not in Maharashtra.

The ‘Damage Congress’ Gameplan

Also, the immediate import of Chavan’s defection is to deny the MVA a chance to win one seat it could in the February 27 Rajya Sabha elections. Of the six seats, the BJP-led Maha-Yuti will comfortably win five seats, while the Congress could still win the sixth.

The BJP hopes that more Congress leaders, sitting MLAs and former stalwarts would defect, but Chavan’s low-profile entry into the BJP and his inability to bargain for a position in the Eknath Shinde-cabinet has apparently not enthused his own close lieutenants in Nanded. In that case, Chavan would be the obvious casualty; the BJP’s gain or the Congress’ loss won’t be great.

That the BJP would be aiming to hurt the Congress in Maharashtra was a given. Anyone with an elementary knowledge of how Modi-Shah’s BJP functions and scouring through their playbook, anyone could predict this was on cards, sooner than later. And if one were to parse through the ten years of Rajya Sabha elections it would be clear that the BJP invariably engineers defections within the Congress legislature party (Gujarat, Haryana etc) where the latter is the main political rival. It’s for the Congress, thus, to find ways to keep its flock together ahead of every RS poll.

On the surface, the BJP is sitting pretty. In their own heart, they know 43 is a tough ask.

Jaideep Hardikar is a Nagpur-based journalist, a Roving Reporter with the People's Archive of Rural India, and the author of "Ramrao - The story of India's farm crisis". Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication.