BJP is caught in its own Maharashtra trap. It has little to gain in Assembly polls

BJP is caught in its own Maharashtra trap. It has little to gain in Assembly polls

Maharashtra’s budget presented by the state’s Finance Minister Ajit Pawar Friday perfectly fitted Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s description of ‘revdis’— Rs 1,500 stipend to every woman, waiver of electricity bills, free LPG cylinders, etc. Remember what Modi had said about this: “This revdi culture is very dangerous for the country’s development…will never build new expressways, new airports or defence corridors for you…we have to defeat this thinking.”

That was in Uttar Pradesh in July 2022.

About a year later, when the Congress announced ‘guarantees’ like cash assistance, free LPG cylinders and bus rides for women before the Karnataka Assembly election, the PM said, “A country cannot be run like this…revdi culture is essentially eating away the resources of future generations. The BJP thinks for the next 25 years and doesn’t take shortcuts.”

A few months later, he stopped talking about revdis as then Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, rolled out the Ladli Behna Yojana. The BJP promised similar cash assistance to women in other poll-bound states. It worked for the party. Modi has, therefore, moved on.

By adopting Chouhan’s model and ignoring Modi’s stand against revdis, the Eknath Shinde-led government in Maharashtra has shown a lack of confidence in its own performance—and a lack of political imagination. It’s understandable, given how the three Mahayuti (grand alliance) constituents—the BJP, Shinde’s Shiv Sena and Ajit Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party (NCP)—together won only 17 of the 48 seats in the state, down from 41 that the National Democratic Alliance had won in 2019.

Shinde’s Shiv Sena won two seats less than Uddhav Thackeray Shiv Sena’s tally of nine. In the 13 seats where the two Senas contested against each other, Shinde’s Sena won seven, including one with a margin of 48 votes, while Thackeray’s Sena won six. The Shinde camp might claim a draw, but the result was certainly a let-down for a leader that had walked away with 40 of 56 MLAs and 13 of 18 MPs of the united Sena. This was despite Modi’s popularity, which typically swings a considerable chunk of voters in the NDA’s favour in Lok Sabha elections. If Shinde wasn’t embarrassed by his party’s underwhelming performance, it’s because his partners fared worse: the BJP dropped to nine seats from 23 in the 2019 polls and Ajit Pawar’s NCP managed just one seat.

The assembly election in October will be a different ball game altogether in the state. The ‘Modi factor’ won’t be strong enough to cushion or propel the Mahayuti in a significant way. The ruling coalition is on the back foot. However, there are still three months to go before elections. If the Shinde-led government is able to deliver on its budgetary promises the way Chouhan did in MP, the Mahayuti may fancy a turnaround in its prospects.

Having said that, what’s the motivation for BJP workers and leaders in the coming polls? How enthusiastically would they work to ensure a second term for Shinde? Would they also work like ‘Modi’s Hanuman’, Chirag Paswan, did against Nitish Kumar in the last Bihar assembly election?

Maratha leader

Maharashtra BJP chief Chandrashekhar Bawankule recently hinted that the Mahayuti’s CM candidate’s place was still open. The BJP’s central leadership and alliance partners will take a decision on it, he said.

Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis’ desire to quit the post and work full-fledged to strengthen the BJP ahead of the Assembly election needs to be seen in this context. He had accepted a demotion and the deputy’s job ostensibly on a temporary basis and with the limited objective of politically finishing Uddhav Thackeray. The BJP was expected to regain and assert its primacy in the alliance after the Lok Sabha election. The former CM had certainly not bargained for a permanently diminished role with Shinde in the driver’s seat. Yet, the Lok Sabha polls have created a circumstance in which the BJP has no choice but to indulge Shinde and his ambitions.

Manoj Jarange Patil’s Maratha reservation stir cost the Mahayuti dearly in the Lok Sabha election and threatens to disrupt its Assembly plans as well.

The BJP can’t afford to be seen as undermining Shinde, a Maratha leader. Not that Shinde can swing Maratha votes. It didn’t help Mahayuti’s cause in the Marathwada region—hotbed of reservation movement—where the opposition coalition the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) won seven of the eight seats. Yet, the BJP has to go into the Assembly polls with Shinde as its face—unless it can prop up another Maratha face and dare the Sena leader to quit the alliance. The BJP could probably have shown such gumption if it had more than 272 seats in the Lok Sabha. It can’t in the current circumstances.

So, think of a likely scenario in the Assembly polls. If the MVA wins, the BJP would obviously be a loser. It would be confronted with the task of rebuilding. Thanks to the crab-in-the-bucket politics in the BJP, Fadnavis, a Brahmin who emerged as an alternative face in Maratha-OBC-Dalit-centric Maharashtra politics, finds himself with a much-diminished stature. His tenure from 2014 to 2019 was marked by good governance but it goes without saying that he also used his clout to sideline many leaders like Eknath Khadse and Vinod Tawde—and Poonam Mahajan from among the younger generation.

CM challenger

In 2019, the BJP’s tally came down to 105 from 122 in the 2014 Assembly polls but the NDA had a comfortable majority. Mind you, the BJP and the Shiv Sena contested separately in 2014. The BJP contested on 260 seats. When the two parties were in alliance in 2019, the BJP contested 164 seats and won 105. It was certainly not a mandate against Fadnavis.

When Uddhav Thackeray upped the ante, demanding CMship, the BJP high command looked the other way. Ask anyone in the BJP and the Sena. They will tell you that if Modi had given just one call to Thackeray or if Union Home Minister Amit Shah had taken the initiative, Fadnavis, once touted as a PM material, would have been in his 10th year as CM today. He soon saw his detractor, Vinod Tawde, getting a powerful position in Delhi as the BJP’s national general secretary. Khadse, who had said that Fadnavis “destroyed” his life, now has his daughter-in-law as a minister in the Modi government and is set to rejoin the BJP. To cut the long story short, the crab-in-the-bucket politics has been eating into the vitals of the Maharashtra BJP. If the party goes out of power, it will precipitate an all-out war, the result of which is anybody’s guess.

If the Mahayuti wins in the Maharashtra Assembly polls, it won’t necessarily give a big boost to the BJP. Shinde, if re-elected as CM, would pose a bigger challenge to the BJP than Thackeray ever did as a frenemy. Those who once thought that Shinde would play second fiddle to Fadnavis have already revised their opinion, as have those who thought that the BJP would use and throw him. Shinde has proved to be a much, much smarter politician than many thought of him. His second term in the driver’s seat could see the BJP being pushed back to its pre-Modi era, when it played second fiddle to Bal Thackeray and then his son, Uddhav.

Therefore, no matter who wins the coming Maharashtra assembly election—the MVA or Mahayuti—the BJP will have much to lose and little to gain.

DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. He tweets @dksingh73. Views are personal.

(Edited by Ratan Priya)