Think of a state that witnessed 1,192 communal clashes from 1998 to 2008, the highest in the country, which claimed 172 lives. Think of India’s financial capital, which witnessed 83 communal riots during 1908-2009, claiming 1,900 lives and injuries to over 8,000 people.
Just remember these figures from an official study of the socio-economic profile of Muslims in Maharashtra. I will come back to it shortly.
For now, think of the poster boy of Maharashtra’s ‘vikash’ or development—Devendra Fadnavis. The state’s home minister blaming “Aurangzeb ki aulaad” (Aurangzeb’s descendant) for Kolhapur’s communal tension sounded so un-Fadnavis-like. From 2014 to 2019, as the chief minister of Maharashtra, he was never seen as a polarising figure. His focus was on infrastructure—from expediting and expanding the UPA-era metro lines’ project in Mumbai, coastal road, trans-harbour link, Mumbai-Nagpur expressway and so on and so forth. In January 2018, he declared that Maharashtra was planning to get into the trillion-dollar GSDP (gross state domestic product) league in the next 7-10 years. “Businesses can vouch for it that nobody is troubling them. And that is the strength of Maharashtra,” The Times of India quoted him as saying ahead of an investment summit.
Those were the days when Maharashtrians and many outside the state were lapping up everything that Fadnavis would say. Adityanath was yet to become the ‘vikas purush’ that he became in his second tenure as the CM of Uttar Pradesh. And Himanta Biswa Sarma was yet to become chief minister of Assam. Fadnavis was in a league of his own then, with many in the BJP as also in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) seeing in him a potential prime minister. Businesses did vouch for it that nobody would trouble them then.
Until Fadnavis’ arrival on the political centre stage as the chief minister, Nitin Gadkari was the BJP’s poster boy in Maharashtra who, as public works development minister, was credited with the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. He had the chutzpah to reject Dhirubhai Ambani’s lowest bid of Rs 3,600 crore and have a bet with the industrialist that he would get his moustache shaven if he didn’t get the expressway made at half that cost. It cost Rs 1,600 crore and Gadkari, also called Mumbai’s ‘flyover man’, saved his moustache.
In Fadnavis, the BJP got a new poster boy as then-Maharashtra chief minister went on expediting and completing long-pending infrastructure projects and undertaking new ones. Only the second Brahmin chief minister of Maharashtra— Manohar Joshi being the first—where Brahmins are estimated to constitute barely three per cent of the population, Fadnavis was seen as a political lightweight when Prime Minister Narendra Modi made him the chief minister in 2014. In fact, he was a part of Modi’s larger political experiment that year—ignoring politically dominant communities in states to appoint CMs from less influential groups, which together outnumbered the dominant groups. As a counter-polarisation concept, it was brilliant—a Khatri in Jat-dominated Haryana, a Brahmin in Maharashtra, and a Vaishya in tribal-dominated Jharkhand. Five years later, Jharkhand experiment failed. So did Haryana as the BJP couldn’t get a majority on its own. It worked in Maharashtra though. The BJP-Shiv Sena together got a comfortable majority but the BJP high command let the Sena drift away into the adversaries’ camp. But by 2019, Fadnavis was an established leader with a mass appeal. I travelled in Maharashtra in the run-up to the 2019 assembly election. The people might have a lot of grouse against the BJP over poverty, unemployment, and other issues, but they saw Fadnavis as a doer.
At 52, Fadnavis is the tallest BJP leader in Maharashtra and one of the very few mass leaders in the BJP after PM Modi— others being Adityanath, Himanta Sarma, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, and Vasundhara Raje. So, what has happened to that promising young, liberal, modern face of the BJP in Maharashtra? Why does he have to remember Aurangzeb now?
Also read: Why Devendra Fadnavis of 2022 isn’t the same as in 2014
Turn to Hindutva
At a time when social media posts by random individuals seem to be stoking communal passions in several districts of Maharashtra, why would the state’s home minister make his own job tougher with “Aurangzeb ki aulaad” comment? That also brings us to the figures mentioned in the first paragraph. In a state with a history of communal clashes, why would Fadnavis, a leader who wanted to make Maharashtra a trillion-dollar economy, vitiate the investment climate with provocative remarks?
His detractors in the party see it as a diversionary tactic—to take the focus away from the scandal involving his wife, Amruta. She had lodged an FIR against her designer ‘friend’ Aniksha Jaisinghani, accusing her of trying to bribe and blackmail her. It took Mumbai police five weeks to arrest the accused who was released on bail just 11 days after her arrest.
For someone who allegedly tried to bribe and blackmail deputy CM-home minister’s wife, Aniksha certainly got lucky with the police investigation and the court. BJP and RSS leaders have been following this case very curiously.
It’s, however, wrong to see Fadnavis’ new avatar in the context of recent developments. His attempts for an image makeover—from infrastructure man to Hindutva icon—have been noticeable for quite some time. In March, he declared that the state government was thinking of a law on “love jihad”.
Last month he ordered the constitution of a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the Muslim community’s alleged attempt to ‘forcibly’ offer chadar at Trimbakeshwar temple in Nashik. Muslim leaders said that this ritual of showing frankincense from the temple entrance had been going on for decades and denied ever entering the temple or putting any chadar.
In September 2021, in the midst of Covid-19 crisis, Fadnavis, then in opposition, had threatened to forcibly open temples if the government didn’t allow it.
His biggest pitch as a hardline Hindutva leader came in May 2022 when he declared at a party rally in Mumbai, as reported by Hindustan Times: “Those who got scared over removing loudspeakers from mosques are asking where were we when Babri Masjid was demolished? I am proud to say that I was part of Babri Masjid’s demolition. Devendra Fadnavis was there at the site. Before that, I was also lodged at Badaun Central Jail for 18 days during Kar Seva.”
That was about a couple of months before he returned to power as deputy chief minister.
What explains this shift
There could be three explanations for the way Fadnavis has been trying for an image makeover. First, with Uddhav Thackeray joining the so-called secular camp, it’s the BJP’s opportunity to try to fully appropriate the Hindutva space, including Bal Thackeray’s political and ideological legacy. To this end, it may need an ally today in the form of Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena, but ultimately the BJP has to emerge as the sole repository of Hindutva even in Maharashtra. This may explain Fadnavis’ hard right turn.
The second explanation could be the need for polarisation, given the nearly frozen votebanks of different parties, which seem to give an edge to the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA)—the alliance of the Congress, Uddhav Thackeray’s Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). Look at the results of the last five assembly elections. The worst voteshare of any of the three MVA partners today is 16 per cent. In the 2019 assembly election, the Sena got 16.41 per cent, the Congress 15.87 per cent and the NCP 16.71 per cent. That was the worst performance of the Congress in terms of voteshare. It was almost the worst for the other two, too, but not technically. The Sena got 16.26 per cent votes and the NCP got 16.37 per cent in 2009.
The long and short of it is that the MVA commands about 48 per cent of the votes, going by their worst performances in elections in the past 25 years. The only solace for the BJP here is that the official Shiv Sena (of Shinde) is with it now. So, BJP optimists would believe that the Sena’s 16 percent votebank (of 2019) has entirely got transferred to Shinde. For the sake of convenience, let’s assume that the BJP commands 28 per cent votes in Maharashtra. I have chosen this figure as the BJP got 27.82 per cent votes in the 2014 assembly election—its best so far—when it went alone. The BJP would then need Shinde’s Sena to bring a majority of erstwhile Sena’s voters into the NDA fold. Let’s keep the Sena voteshare aside for the moment. Even with their worst performances, hypothetically, the Congress and the NCP would command a combined voteshare of 32 per cent. The BJP’s best performance was 28 per cent. This shows how much the BJP must depend on Eknath Shinde to deliver.
As it is, there are many sceptics in the BJP camp. As I mentioned in my column last month, a senior BJP leader was desperately trying to tell Amit Shah at a party meeting in Mumbai how the Shiv Sainiks were not shifting their allegiance to Shinde’s party.
That leader happened to be a confidante of Devendra Fadnavis. This should explain Maharashtra deputy CM’s attempts to consolidate the Hindutva votebank.
There could, however, be a third explanation for Fadnavis’ attempt for an image makeover. With all his achievements as chief minister and having shown his political acumen by splitting the Shiv Sena, he has not found favour with the BJP high command. In 2019, Delhi made little effort to mollify Uddhav Thackeray and try to form the government. And when he split the Sena and brought the government down, the high command virtually undermined his stature by demoting him as deputy CM. He might have noticed that chief ministers following hardline Hindutva have a better chance of winning the high command’s trust—from Assam’s Himanta Biswa Sarma to Haryana’s Manohar Lal Khattar to Uttarakhand’s Pushkar Dhami. Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan had to shed off his moderate image to buy peace with the bosses in Delhi. Uttar Pradesh’s Adityanath has been working hard to shed his past image as a hardliner and emerge as a totally development-oriented CM. Adityanath can afford to because he has grown too big for the high command to be interfered with. Fadnavis isn’t there yet. And so he must try to turn the clock back, emerge as a Hindutva hardliner first and then burnish his image as a leader who has had the dream of making Maharashtra a trillion-dollar economy.
DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)