Mumbai: Mangesh Chivate, an officer on special duty (OSD) in Chief Minister Eknath Shinde’s team Wednesday shared a post by a Shinde supporter on Facebook. It was a collage of two photos.
In one, Shinde, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party’s (NCP) Praful Patel and Sunil Tatkare were standing at a round table, deep in discussion.
The other showed Shinde at a National Democratic Alliance (NDA) meeting, seated three places away from Modi on the right after N. Chandrababu Naidu and Nitish Kumar. To Modi’s left were functionaries and ministers of the BJP and, among them, Union Minister Amit Shah, too, was seated three places away from the PM.
The post described CM Shinde as a “kingmaker”.
The same day, Uddhav Thackeray of the Shiv Sena (UBT) skipped a meeting of INDIA, the Opposition alliance, chaired by Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge, sending party leaders — Sanjay Raut and newly-elected MP Arvind Sawant — in his stead.
The two incidents give a glimpse into how the balance of scales have tilted within the ruling and Opposition alliances in Maharashtra post the Lok Sabha polls, and how this might impact the state assembly election just four months away.
With just two seats short of the BJP’s tally in Maharashtra, the Shinde-led Shiv Sena has emerged as a player that the BJP can neither discount nor dominate beyond a point within the ruling Mahayuti. On the other hand, the Congress’s performance in Maharashtra, emerging as the party with the highest number of seats (13), will now push the limits of its bargaining power within the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), with potential ego battles with the Shiv Sena (UBT).
The Mahayuti won 17 seats of Maharashtra’s 48 Lok Sabha seats. Among its constituents, the BJP won 9 out of the 28 seats it contested, the Shinde-led Shiv Sena got 7 of the 15 contested, while the Ajit Pawar-led NCP clinched just 1 out of the 4 it fought.
The MVA won 30 seats with the Congress getting 13 of the 17 seats it fought, the Shiv Sena (UBT) winning 9 of the 21 seats it fought and the NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar) ending up with the best strike rate in the state by winning 8 of the 10 seats that fell in its kitty as part of the alliance’s seat-sharing formula.
“Assuming every Lok Sabha seat has roughly six assembly segments, if the MVA works its strategy properly for the assembly polls, the current victory of 30 Lok Sabha seats can be extrapolated to roughly 180 assembly seats,” political commentator Hemant Desai told thePrint.
“Within the Mahayuti, Eknath Shinde’s importance will rise significantly, allowing him to extract more from the alliance for his party. In the MVA, on the other hand, there is going to be a power tussle between the Congress and Shiv Sena (UBT) considering the latter got a good number of votes from Muslims, which is the Congress’ traditional vote bank,” he added.
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Shiv Sena (UBT) vs Congress
Senior Congress leaders ThePrint spoke to say that the party took things in its stride when the Shiv Sena (UBT) dominated seat-sharing within the MVA, denying the Congress a few seats it really wanted. But Congress exceeded the expectations of political watchers, improving its tally in Maharashtra from just 1 (Chandrapur), to 13, despite key leaders such as former Chief Minister Ashok Chavan and former MPs Milind Deora leaving the party.
Chavan joined the BJP, while Deora joined the Shinde-led Shiv Sena. Both are Rajya Sabha MPs. In Nanded, the stronghold of Chavan, the Congress won by 59,442 votes, while in Mumbai South, the former constituency of Deora, the MVA candidate from Shiv Sena (UBT), Arvind Sawant, emerged victorious.
In Chandrapur, the only seat that the Congress won in 2019, Pratibha Dhanorkar, the wife of late Congress MP Suresh Dhanorkar, registered a thumping victory against State BJP Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar who lost by 2.6 lakh votes.
“This result has significantly boosted our confidence and bargaining power. We will definitely demand a higher share of seats in the assembly elections,” said a senior Congress leader who wished to not be named.
One of the seats that the Congress let go of was Sangli, a traditional bastion that it allowed the Shiv Sena (UBT) to contest from. Congress rebel Vishal Patil, grandson of former Congress CM Vasantdada Patil, contested as an Independent and won the seat by more than one lakh votes, relegating the Shiv Sena (UBT) to the third position. Congress leader Vishwajeet Kadam actively helped Patil in his campaign.
“Giving away Sangli was a mistake. It also impacted the MVA’s prospects in neighbouring Hatkanangale, a part of which is in the Sangli district. Similarly, the Shiv Sena (UBT) insisted on taking Mumbai South Central when Varsha Gaikwad was better suited to contest from that constituency. She had to contest from a completely new constituency, and fortunately she won, but at one point of time, it felt like she had almost lost,” a second senior Congress leader told ThePrint.
Gaikwad, an MLA from Dharavi, is the daughter of former Mumbai South Central MP Eknath Gaikwad and was keen on contesting from her father’s old seat. The Shiv Sena (UBT)’s Anil Desai contested the seat, which includes the party’s Marathi bastions of Dadar and Mahim, and won with a margin of 53,384.
Gaikwad’s winning margin against BJP’s Ujjwal Nikam, former public prosecutor famous for sending 26/11 accused Ajmal Kasab to the gallows, was much slimmer at 16,514.
“In the assembly polls, we will be in a better position to ensure that we don’t repeat such mistakes,” the above-mentioned Congress leader said.
In confidence, some Shiv Sena (UBT) leaders admit that their party was unnecessarily stubborn in demanding the Sangli seat. However, the MVA’s defeat here has already sparked some tension between the Shiv Sena (UBT) and the Congress with Thackeray blaming his alliance partner for his candidate’s loss, party sources say.
A senior Shiv Sena (UBT) leader said, “We ensured that we transferred our votes to all our allies, but the reverse didn’t happen everywhere. We will go through the results assembly constituency wise, and we will know exactly where the alliance fell short.”
Dr Sanjay Patil, a researcher with the Mumbai University’s politics and civics department, said Uddhav Thackeray has always had an upper hand within the MVA and a lot depends on what kind of position he gets in the alliance after the result. “With the assembly polls just four months away, Sharad Pawar and Congress central leadership will try to ensure that the current arrangement is not disturbed beyond a point to avoid risking any upsets,” he said.
Meanwhile, political commentator Desai said, the performance of the two NCPs — that of the Ajit Pawar-led NCP, with the worst strike rate in the state and, of the Sharad Pawar-led faction, with the best strike rate in the state — has shown that the uncle Pawar still calls the shots in the party.
Supporters of the nephew, however, argue that Ajit Pawar’s strength is fighting assembly polls, and he can perhaps still deliver four months down the line.
‘Kingmaker’ Shinde
Within the Mahayuti, the Lok Sabha results have, to a large extent, dispelled the idea that the BJP is the big brother of the alliance, the dominating factor.
“In the run up to the alliance’s seat-sharing talks, the BJP tried to also involve itself in the seats and candidates of its alliance partners citing their surveys,” said political commentator Abhay Deshpande.
Shinde bargained hard with an initially unrelenting BJP, optimising seats for his party. He eventually fought 15 of 48 Lok Sabha seats in the state. The entire process, however, derailed seat-sharing finalisation till the eleventh hour for some seats. Leaders from the Shinde-led Shiv Sena have publicly flagged this as one of the reasons for the Mahayuti’s overall losses.
Speaking to reporters in Mumbai Wednesday, Deepak Kesarkar, a state minister with the Shinde-led Shiv Sena, said, “Seats have to be declared on time. Constituencies are quite large. Our candidates did not get the time to canvas across constituencies. We suffered because of that. Next time we will decide our seats well in advance and plan well.”
Emerging with just two seats less than the BJP in Maharashtra, and becoming the third-largest NDA ally, Shinde’s bargaining power has now got a further boost.
The Lok Sabha results have also indicated that the Mahayuti will have to take efforts to placate angry Marathas going by the results of the eight seats in Marathwada, of which the Mahayuti only managed to clinch one — Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (formerly Aurangabad) from where the Shinde-led Shiv Sena won as the presence of both the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) and the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi ate into the Opposition MVA’s votes.
There was considerable anger against the Mahayuti government in Marathwada over the issue of Maratha quota.
In February, the Shinde-led Maharashtra government passed a bill to carve a 10 percent Maratha quota in government jobs and education. However, standalone quotas in the past have not withstood legal tests, and the Marathas, especially from Marathwada, have been demanding reservation as Kunbis through the Other Backward Classes (OBC) category.
Sensing the mood on the ground, the Shinde-led state government last week allocated Rs 25.98 crore for a media plan to publicise all the measures that it has taken in the benefit of the Maratha community, as per a government resolution that ThePrint has seen.
A BJP leader who wished to not be named said, “The party will also have to find a way to break a potent combination of Marathi-Muslim-Dalit vote bank that the Shiv Sena (UBT) has created for itself, especially in Mumbai.”
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)
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