Mumbai: New, untested alliances, two factions of the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), the Maratha quota agitation and the impact of Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) on the Opposition’s votes — these are the many factors that have made Maharashtra a neck-and-neck contest this time.
As of 11.45 am, the Mahayuti, which comprises the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar-led NCP, is trailing with 17 seats, while the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), which comprises the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), the NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar) and the Congress, is in the lead in 30 seats.
In one seat, Sangli, Independent candidate Vishal Patil, a Congress rebel, is leading, with the BJP in the second position.
Within the Mahayuti, the BJP is leading in 11 seats and the Shinde-led Shiv Sena in five, while the Ajit Pawar-led NCP is leading in one.
Within the MVA, the Congress and the Shiv Sena (UBT) are leading with 11 seats each, while the NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar) is leading in eight seats.
Maharashtra sends 48 MPs to the Lok Sabha, the second highest number after Uttar Pradesh.
In 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had contested the Lok Sabha polls with the undivided Shiv Sena as its ally, and together, they had swept the state, winning 41 of the 48 seats. The NCP won four seats, while the Congress was reduced to one.
Of the remaining two seats, Navneet Rana, an Independent MLA at the time, clinched one, while the other went to the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen.
But this time, the battle lines have been redrawn. The state’s two main regional parties have split, traditional allies have become rivals and traditional foes have become friends. This is the first major poll where these new battle lines have had to undergo the test of democracy as the Mahayuti takes on the MVA.
Moreover, despite being a general election that is fought largely on national issues, there were multiple local issues at play that dominated the discourse of the poll campaign in Maharashtra.
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A lot at stake
Both the alliances in Maharashtra — the Mahayuti as well as the MVA — had internal tussles over seat-sharing.
Within the Mahayuti, the BJP eventually contested 28 seats, while the Shinde-led Shiv Sena drove hard negotiations to get 15 seats in its kitty. The Ajit Pawar-led NCP got the poorest deal within the alliance, with just four seats, while one was fought by Mahadev Jankar of the Rashtriya Samaj Paksha, an NDA ally.
In the MVA, the Shiv Sena (UBT) announced candidates for seats even as the alliance was still hammering out seat-sharing details, getting the largest share of the pie. Eventually, the Shiv Sena (UBT) contested 21 seats, the Congress got 17 seats, while the NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar) contested 10 seats.
There is a lot at stake for all players involved. For the BJP, the poll result will be a judgement on to what extent the “Modi card” works in Maharashtra. The election will also be a judgement on whether its political engineering experiment of facilitating, if not causing, vertical splits in the state’s two main regional parties has paid off.
Some of the seats that will be key for the BJP are the three Mumbai constituencies where the party is fighting, constituencies in western Maharashtra such as Pune, Kolhapur, Solapur, Madha, as well as Beed, Nanded, Ratnagiri-Sindhudurg, Chandrapur, and so on.
For the two Shiv Sena and NCP factions, the poll results are akin to a verdict in open public court on which faction is more popular as the “real party”. The poll results are also a test of the personal equity of the leaders of these parties.
The undivided Shiv Sena’s MLAs, MPs and leaders who rebelled with Shinde took a leap of faith, betting on Shinde’s leadership skills as well as his political equation with the BJP’s senior leadership. Similarly, those who stayed back with the Shiv Sena (UBT) took a bet on the “Thackeray brand”.
The two Shiv Sena factions have been in a direct conflict in 13 of Maharashtra’s 48 Lok Sabha seats, including the party’s bastions such as the three seats in Mumbai, Thane, Kalyan and Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (formerly Aurangabad).
Similarly, within the two NCPs, the results will be a public verdict on who is more popular — the octogenarian uncle, Sharad Pawar, or his nephew, Ajit Pawar — and with which of them the party’s organisational strength has rallied. The two NCP factions are taking each other on directly in two seats — Baramati and Shirur — with both having conducted neck-to-neck poll campaigns.
For the Congress, which lost a string of leaders before the elections such as former chief minister Ashok Chavan, former Union minister Milind Deora and former MP Sanjay Nirupam, this election is about rebuilding itself in the state it was born in and where it ruled for multiple terms before being almost wiped out in 2019.
Local factors in a national election
Across Maharashtra and especially in Marathwada, which has eight constituencies, there has been a political consolidation along caste lines that could impact poll results.
Maratha quota leader Manoj Jarange-Patil’s agitation for reservation for the Marathas has angered the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). Jarange-Patil has been demanding reservation for the Maratha community in government jobs and education through the OBC category, claiming that all Marathas were originally Kunbis, a caste under the OBC umbrella.
While there were signs of political consolidation along caste lines on the ground, there’s also some real anger against the Mahayuti government in Maharashtra, which first agreed to grant Kunbi certificates to all Marathas on the basis of relations through birth or by marriage within the same caste, but has not yet issued a final notification to that effect.
In the six seats of Mumbai and the surrounding seats in the larger Mumbai Metropolitan Region, the campaign took the flavour of a Maharashtra vs Gujarat divide, with the Shiv Sena (UBT) emphasising how the Narendra Modi-led government at the Centre was allegedly taking away investments from Maharashtra to Gujarat.
In the last general election, the alliance of the Congress and the undivided NCP lost at least seven seats as Ambedkar’s VBA, which has a sizable Dalit following, cut into its votes. This time, too, the VBA has not joined the opposition MVA alliance and is pitted directly against the Congress in 14 seats.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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