In Maharashtra, a tale of two coalitions

So severe is the Congress drubbing that its entire top brass, including Balasaheb Thorat, one of the architects of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), and former chief minister (CM) Prithviraj Chavan, lost. The party that contested 101 struggled to cross a tally of 15.

These results will also likely accelerate the decline of the two regional parties that have long dominated politics in Maharashtra. From being a raucous, robust nativist Hindutva party of Balasaheb Thackeray, the idea of the Shiv Sena lies weakened and attenuated despite Eknath Shinde’s performance. It is perhaps ironic that the rise and fall of the Shiv Sena is tied so intrinsically to the Congress.

Though forged in the heat of the Samyukta Maharashtra Movement in 1966, the Shiv Sena emerged as Bombay’s very own power-centre in 1985 when it swept the BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) elections. This was made possible by the tacit support of then Congress CM Vasantdada Patil, who sought to cut down his own party’s leaders, including  Murli Deora, a Marwari. Vasantdada had famously remarked, “Bombay is the capital of Maharashtra, but there is no Maharashtra in Bombay,” and he went to the extent of endorsing Balasaheb Thackeray’s nativist position on barring entry of outsiders who came looking for jobs into the city.

Thackeray plastered Bombay with posters of Vasantdada’s statements, and so began the Sena’s control of the BMC, the country’s richest civic body, which to this day is the source of its political power.

Equally though, for a party that built its political capital from Othering — whether it was Tamilians, Muslims, the migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, or the “secular” Congress — its formal alliance with Congress and the Nationalis Congress Party (NCP) in 2019 put its voters and cadre at crossroads. It also gave Eknath Shinde a handle to mount a rebellion and break the party. 

Shinde’s Shiv Sena winning 57 seats — more than all of MVA put together — is a resounding rejection of the Shiv Sena (UBT)’s emotional pitch branding Shinde and his lawmakers as traitors. Slogans calling the Shinde government Gaddar, Mindhe Sarkar (beholden government), and “Pannas khokhe, ekdum OK” (bribe-takers) have been effectively snuffed out. 

But the rough-hewn Shinde, despite the meteoric rise, his financial largess, and instincts of an ace poker player, lacks the personality cult of the Thackerays that has dominated the idea of the Shiv Sena. Shinde, who counts Thane strongman the late Anand Dighe as his mentor, recently asserted in a private conversation: “Uddhav Thackeray was CM for two-and-half years, and so have I been; we are equals.” But the party he has fashioned is a far cry from the distinct nativist outfit of Balasaheb Thackeray, and can best be described as BJP-lite. 

A similar existential dilemma grips the NCP. Sharad Pawar, its founder, who bestrode Maharashtra’s political stage like a colossus, has possibly thrown his last dice. He will be 89 by the time the next set of elections come around.

With most of his senior leaders defecting with Ajit Pawar, he was left with a brigade of young leaders who are still to be groomed. More worryingly, his party led in only seven of the 40 seats it contested against Ajit Pawar’s NCP, and suffered a near rout in the sugar belt of western Maharashtra, Pawar’s home turf and whose politics he dominated for decades.

For Ajit Pawar — under his uncle’s shadow for the longest — Saturday’s results will be doubly sweet. He not only bested Sharad Pawar but also won the prestige battle of Baramati against his own nephew, Yugendra. It will not be surprising if there is yet another exodus from Sharad Pawar’s party to him in the near future.

The ace administrator who has been unable to become CM thus far, Ajit Pawar split the NCP in 2023 and joined the BJP-Shinde alliance to allegedly seek protection from probes by central agencies in the main.

But his beliefs are at variance with those of his two allies who are ideologically compatible, and he is mistrusted by the core BJP-voter as well as the cadre. With the Opposition decimated, the BJP will, in all likelihood, keep him close and smother any ideological rebellion.

There are many reasons for this exceptional win by the Mahayuti, which will be parsed in the coming days, but one of the main causes is the inability of the MVA to convince voters that it is a natural alliance.

For one, the consolidation of the Muslim vote behind the Shiv Sena (UBT) in the Lok Sabha elections just four months ago had left the party deeply unsettled. A prominent leader confessed in private: “The Muslim vote could move tomorrow, and we will then be left with neither the Muslim vote nor our core Hindu vote. We are stuck in a bad way.” Uddhav Thackeray’s move to float his name for the chief ministerial face of the MVA was an effort to shore up the base. But his eventual snubbing and the prolonged bickering among the allies over seat-sharing made the inherent problems of the MVA all too apparent. Like Humpty-Dumpty, it might be difficult to rescue the alliance from the weight of its contradictions.

The views expressed are personal