A series of localised communal riots across Maharashtra; Hindu Jan Akrosh rallies by the far right; and the deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, who holds the home portfolio in the cabinet, seeing a sudden rise in ‘Love Jihad’ cases.
Is there more than what meets the eye?
Having managed to topple the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government and ruthlessly hijack Uddhav Thackeray’s party, the Bharatiya Janata Party has realised the crowding of Hindutva parties in a limited political space might actually work to its own detriment. Maharashtra today has a dominant Hindutva flag bearer in the BJP, plus both factions of Shiv Sena – with Uddhav on the other side, Raj Thackeray-led MNS, and a growing number of smaller outfits – all vouching for different shades of Hindutva. BJP needs to hold on to its core Hinduva vote, and win a massive undecided vote to stop the MVA.
While there is a pro-Hindutva polarisation, there’s also the anti-Hindutva voters.
BJP’s Shinde Bet
Any formulation that seeks to win elections therefore must win over the huge undecided mass currently struggling with high inflation and unemployment. On that front, the Eknath Shinde government is lacklustre. A year of Shinde’s government has nothing to show for a centrepiece of its governance, except long court battles, cantankerous quarrels over political turfs, and extravagant PR exercises. Increasingly, the BJP realises that Shinde and his Sena are a liability.
The BJP looks worried about two other factors in Maharashtra, which sends 48 candidates to Lok Sabha: One, the Shinde-faction hasn’t brought any vote-dividend as suggested by a mood-of-the-state poll conducted late May by the Sakal media group. The poll suggested the MVA, if it manages to transfer votes, stands at 48 percent vote share, while the BJP and Eknath Shinde faction at 38-39 percent. BJP remains the number one party in terms of vote share, but it’s not enough to sweep both the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections. This bipolarity of alliances gets complicated by smaller formations such as the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA).
Two, the BJP does not have a pan-Maharashtra OBC face to draw a large number of votes, something that late Gopinath Munde once commanded. Shinde himself is an OBC but has no appeal beyond his home turf of Thane – and Maharashtra is much bigger than that.
A Tottering Alliance
In toppling Uddhav Thackeray government and splitting his party, BJP accomplished one task; the other task of weakening MVA remains unfinished – it’s the second task that BJP finds hard to achieve. The BJP tried splitting the NCP; it did not work. It will try breaking away a faction of the Congress, but knows its own workers won’t accept them.
Devendra Fadnavis remains the only face, having sidelined all other BJP leaders. And whatever his supporters may claim, fact is, he too has no pan-Maharashtra mass following.
Meanwhile, cracks have emerged between Shinde-led Shiv Sena and BJP – it started a week ago when news surfaced that Amit Shah had warned Shinde of his five controversial ministers when both he and Fadnavis met Shah in New Delhi a couple of weeks ago. Shah was in Nanded last week, addressing rallies, but neither he nor Fadnavis refuted these talks.
BJP is also aggressively staking claim to Shinde’s home turf, Thane, including his son Shrikant’s Lok Sabha seat of Kalyan, provoking the latter to hit back. Local dynamics between BJP and Shinde Sena is tempestuous, with the BJP brass struggling to reconcile with the ragtag Shinde Sena, which has won the party symbol from the Election Commission but hasn’t inherited the old spirit. Two days ago, an advertisement ran on the front-pages of all Marathi newspapers – who floated it remains a mystery – that subtly claimed Eknath Shinde was more popular than Fadnavis
To make matters complex, we don’t know how the two alliances would perform on the ground.
The litmus test would have been the local body elections, which are overdue for over a year and a half. The local bodies are without elected representatives, and that is angering grassroots workers and marginalised sections who rely on their corporators for a range of daily needs – from accessing government schemes to dealing with municipalities.
The polls would have revealed whether the alliance partners managed a smooth vote transfer and which way the undecided voter swings, but now such outcomes remain anybody’s guess. The BJP-Shinde Sena seems reluctant to hold the polls for the same reason, but more they delay more MVA gains.
MVA’s Imperatives
On the MVA side, NCP is flexing its muscles – it has already staked claim to the Pune Lok Sabha seat, for long a Congress constituency; the Congress is buoyed by the Karnataka win, and is in no hurry to go into an early seat sharing arrangement. The Congress wants MVA to factor in all 48 Lok Sabha seats and 288 Vidhan Sabha elections, and bring in smaller parties such as VBA into the fold. Uddhav Thackeray seems to have public sympathy but his party has been severely dented.
Away from all this, NCP supremo Sharad Pawar has been holding a series of meetings to review the political situation in all districts, while rolling out his succession plan early this week. It could be Pawar Sr’s last hurrah in 2024, and his close aides say he hasn’t taken the toppling of the MVA government – his brainchild – lightly. Pawar wants to take the battle to his rivals’ turf, which is why his advice to his party workers – not to overstretch seat-sharing demands – at a recent meet in Mumbai’s Yeshwantrao Chavan Centre is prescient.
Be ready for sacrifice, he seemed to suggest in Marathi, look at the broad picture.
Jaideep Hardikar is a Nagpur-based journalist, a core team member of 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.
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