Mumbai: “It’s sunny right now, I can’t predict if there will be rain in 15 minutes,” Supriya Sule, Nationalist Congress Party’s (NCP) MP from Baramati, had told reporters in April amid talks of her cousin, Ajit Pawar, rebelling against the party and joining the Eknath Shinde-Devendra Fadnavis government.
Less than three months later, it did not just rain, but poured in Maharashtra as Ajit Pawar was administered the oath of office as deputy chief minister, making it a Shinde-Fadnavis-Pawar government along with what he claims is “a majority of MLAs” from the NCP — with Shinde still the CM and Fadnavis and Pawar as his deputies.
And with that, Ajit split the NCP just the way Shinde had split the Shiv Sena and joined hands with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) just over a year ago in June 2022, staking claim to the party’s name and symbol.
The move by Ajit Pawar is bound to have consequences for all players involved, especially with the Lok Sabha and Maharashtra assembly polls scheduled next year.
“In its almost ten years of experience of ruling at the Centre, one thing is clear that the BJP always has multiple strategies ready at the same time. In 2019, when the MVA was formed, it became a big headache for the BJP which lost power in Maharashtra. The MVA was a project to motivate opposition parties to unite against the BJP. So the BJP first tried to dismantle the MVA by using Shinde, and now Ajit Pawar,” Sanjay Patil, a research assistant with the Mumbai University’s politics and civics department, told ThePrint.
He added that the timing of the move could have been due to the increased frenzy of opposition parties to unite against the BJP ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. “This is a message to opposition parties that if you try to do this, you will either become a Shiv Sena or an NCP,” he said, adding that reducing Sharad Pawar’s political importance in the state is the first step towards taking the heft out of the Opposition’s efforts nationally.
The splintering of two of Maharashtra’s regional parties one after the other considerably weakens the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) comprising the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), the NCP and Congress.
Moreover, it diminishes CM Shinde and his Shiv Sena’s political utility to the BJP, which now doesn’t have to solely rely on them to retain power in Maharashtra.
Also, the induction of Ajit Pawar and eight other NCP leaders in the council of ministers may also disillusion leaders from the Shinde-led faction who had been waiting for a cabinet expansion and political opportunities for themselves for almost a year.
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Reduced leverage for Shinde
Talks of Ajit Pawar joining the government with a majority of the NCP MLAs were thick since April, in the run-up to the Supreme Court’s verdict on disqualification petitions against CM Shinde and Shiv Sena MLAs who had extended their support to him.
Shinde and his party members dodged that bullet when the Supreme Court put the ball in the court of Speaker Rahul Narwekar, a BJP MLA. Narwekar’s order on the disqualification petition is still awaited.
Ajit Pawar and his supporters joining the government weakens the Shinde-led Shiv Sena’s leverage with the BJP because the latter, which has 105 MLAs in the 288-member house, does not have to exclusively depend on the former to continue its hold on Maharashtra.
It also puts a question mark on Shinde being projected as the BJP-Shiv Sena’s CM face in the 2019 state polls considering Ajit Pawar’s ambitions. The 63-year-old MLA has taken oath as the Deputy CM five times, including his most recent appointment, but the climb to the chief minister’s post has been slippery for him.
CM Shinde, however, maintained an upbeat demeanour throughout the oath-taking ceremony, sitting next to Fadnavis and Ajit Pawar. Speaking to reporters after the ceremony, Shinde said, “The government was running as a double engine sarkar. Now it has got a third engine. Now it will run at the speed of a bullet train.”
He added, “When a leader who works is stifled like this, such things happen. You have seen it before, and you are seeing it again now. This is why Ajit Pawar has come with us.”
For a year, the Shinde-led government has functioned with a lean cabinet of 20 ministers, including the CM and deputy CM.
Both Shinde and Fadnavis have talked about a possible cabinet expansion to give ministerial opportunities to leaders from both parties, and set multiple deadlines without meeting any. With the induction of nine MLAs from the NCP, the CM and Deputy CM gave another deadline to cabinet hopefuls in both parties, said sources from the Shinde camp.
A cabinet minister who did not wish to be named said, “We have been told that in another eight or ten days, they will shortlist names for another expansion. Right now, somebody else’s plates needed to be filled.”
Also read: Why BRS’s Maharashtra push is giving Congress & NCP nasty flashbacks to 2014, 2019
Friction within government
A year ago, when 39 MLAs followed Shinde out of the Uddhav Thackeray-led undivided Shiv Sena, many cited differences with the NCP and Ajit Pawar as one of the reasons behind their rebellion.
In the Thackeray-led MVA government Ajit Pawar, they said, the then Deputy CM and finance minister, was allegedly partial to NCP MLAs and would overlook them in distribution of funds. They cited the many rifts between the ground-level cadre of the undivided Shiv Sena and the NCP and how they disliked sitting in the government shoulder-to-shoulder with their former political rivals.
With Ajit Pawar and his MLAs now part of the government again, the conflicts within the government could very well resurface. The Shinde camp ministers, however, chose to downplay any potential rift with Ajit Pawar and his faction of NCP MLAs.
Deepak Kesarkar, who heads the school education and Marathi language portfolios, told reporters, “There can be misunderstandings about each other politically, but we are only keeping Maharashtra’s benefit in mind.”
Similarly, Uday Samant, state industries minister, said CM Shinde will keep a check on any partial treatment or unequal distribution of funds. “At that time (during the MVA rule), we were saying Ajit dada Pawar saheb who is giving funds to his MLAs should be controlled. It is the CM’s job to control it. Shinde saheb will see to it.”
Any potential fissures between the NCP and the Shinde-led Shiv Sena will only add to the woes of a government that has seen its fair share of chinks. Over the past few months, leaders from both the Shinde-led Sena and the BJP have been making statements irking each other.
The controversy over an advertisement placed by the Shinde-led Shiv Sena on the front page of Maharashtra’s newspapers talking about Shinde being more popular than Fadnavis for the CM’s post, citing a survey, and how Prime Minister Narendra Modi and CM Shinde are a “dream team”, had escalated tensions between the two allies. It was followed by another advertisement as damage control, carrying Fadnavis’s picture and talking about people’s preference for the Shinde-Fadnavis government.
Mumbai University’s Patil, however, said that while there are bound to be tensions between the MLAs of the Shinde-led Shiv Sena and Ajit Pawar’s NCP, the former does not have the political space to “make a big deal of the conflicts”.
“The Shinde group doesn’t really have too much space for an excess. The party’s existence is due to the BJP. There might be disagreements, but the Shinde-led Shiv Sena doesn’t have the political might to openly voice them,” he said.
Patil said the BJP too is likely to face internal strifes when it tries to accommodate its two allies in a seat-sharing formula, possibly leaving old-timers of the party disappointed.
Meanwhile, Ajit Pawar’s departure could dent the MVA’s prospects with the NCP having lost some senior leaders such as Dilip Walse Patil and Chhagan Bhujbal who have been definite winners in their respective constituencies.
Like the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), the NCP is also staring at the prospect of having to rebuild a significant part of its organisation. The Congress as well as the Shiv Sena (UBT) have expressed their support for Sharad Pawar.
Speaking to reporters, NCP MLA Jitendra Awhad said, “We should not look at how difficult a situation is. We should look at how to turn it around.”
With inputs from Purva Chitnis
(Edited by Smriti Sinha)
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