Despite its industrial leadership, Maharashtra has faced an agrarian crisis and unemployment in both urban and rural areas.
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón inaugurated the Tata Advanced Systems Limited’s (TASL) aircraft manufacturing facility in Vadodara on Monday — India’s first private-sector FAL complex — the Mahayuti government in Maharashtra would not have imagined that it could become an issue on which it could be cornered or pushed onto the backfoot in the run-up to elections. The state of the art final assembly line complex for the C295 aircraft at Vadodara is a milestone, giving wings to India’s private sector’s ambitions and capacities in manufacturing military aircraft. At the same time, however, the project, given its timing, may also be reopening the Gujarat versus Maharashtra inter-state dispute with a past.
A political controversy had erupted in the state two years ago too, when this project and the relocation of the Vedanta-Foxconn semi-conductor plant from Maharashtra to Gujarat had seen the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi alliance accuse the central BJP leadership of according step-motherly treatment to Maharashtra. Earlier, when the Gift City came up in Gujarat, it was projected as a ploy to undermine the International Financial Services Centre in Mumbai. In the backdrop of the Opposition’s charge is an older Maharashtra-Gujarat rivalry, which has for decades been used by parties to stir up Marathi pride. Given the turmoil and struggle that preceded the birth of Maharashtra and Gujarat, a fraught history has been used to whip up emotions especially during elections. Notably, the criticism that Maharashtra has been hard done by comes even as the state has attracted more than 52 per cent (USD 8.48 bn) of the total FDI received by the country in the quarter ended June 2024. In the year ended 2023-24, Maharashtra received more than one-third of the total FDI attracted by the country at USD 15.1 bn. By comparison, Gujarat received only $1.02bn FDI in the quarter ended June 2024 — only 12 per cent of that received by Maharashtra; and USD 7.3 bn in 2023-24 — just 48 per cent of what Maharashtra got.
Despite its industrial leadership, Maharashtra has faced an agrarian crisis and unemployment in both urban and rural areas. The Opposition alliance was evidently successful in seizing upon discontents in the state in the Lok Sabha election earlier this year, winning 30 seats out of 48, with the Mahayuti bagging only 17. Although competitiveness and rivalry with another state is unlikely to determine the electoral outcome in Maharashtra, for now, it is clearly causing some discomfort for the ruling Mahayuti with the MVA succeeding in pushing the question — why Gujarat, why not Maharashtra? – to the centre of the campaign.
