All eyes are on November 23, when the Maharashtra and Jharkhand Assembly poll results will be announced. The outcome will be a pointer to which way the politics of this country will turn in the months and years ahead.
Without a doubt, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has got a booster dose with the unexpected Haryana hat-trick with an overconfident Congress giving up the wicket.
A clean sweep in Maharashtra and Jharkhand by the BJP would again turn the Opposition into a hapless entity. Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi will be groping for answers as to what went wrong. The feeling in Opposition circles that it was time for Mr Modi to become a thing of the past will give away to despondency. The Opposition’s INDIA bloc will gasp for fresh air.
The internal dynamics within the INDIA grouping is such that all non-Congress parties feel that the grand old party is the elephant in the room and needs to be restrained at every possible opportunity. It suits the BJP to informally help them in such an endeavour. The troubled Congress keeps chanting the unity mantra, but has no idea of how to keep its allies in good humour.
Next year, there are only two Assembly polls: one in Delhi at the beginning of the year and the other in Bihar, which is scheduled towards the end.
Mr Modi, who has for the first time failed to secure an absolute majority for the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections, has a test on hand. He has to show this month that the not-so-good showing in the parliamentary polls was an aberration and he was back on the winning track.
In Jharkhand, the BJP feels that it has got a winning alliance, and there is nothing much to worry about in the tussle against the chief minister Hemant Soren-led INDIA group in the state.
Maharashtra looks a hard nut to crack, with the deep inroads made by the Opposition in the Lok Sabha polls. Harsher still is the fact that the Opposition victory in 31 out of 48 Lok Sabha seats was more than a personal setback for the PM.
The BJP’s star campaigner had been all over Maharashtra during the Lok Sabha polls, addressing as many as 18 rallies, but the BJP-dominated Mahayuti ended up with just 17 seats, down by more than 20 from the previous 41. It was a clear rebuttal of Brand Modi and the politics practised by the Prime Minister and home minister Amit Shah.
If one leaves aside the huge last-minute sops, including the Ladki Bahin Yojana, the Eknath Shinde government has done precious little on the issue of governance. And that could be the nemesis of the ruling side if the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi gets its act together.
The Modi-Shah duo is using every trick possible to divide the Opposition vote, and they do not lack the resources to do so. The troubles witnessed in the finalisation of seat allocations in the Maha Vikas Aghadi speaks volumes about the pulls and pressures in the Opposition grouping, which feels that it has more than a winning chance.
Rightly or wrongly, the vibe in the state’s political circles is that Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena in the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi and Ajit Pawar’s NCP in the ruling Mahayuti would not fare better due to a variety of reasons. Uddhav Thackeray might be a forceful speaker, but the Congress has the vote. Sharad Pawar’s stars are on the ascendant to keep the nephew under check, and the Maratha strongman keenly strategises at the micro level too. Some feel that both the Congress and the BJP, as well as Sharad Pawar’s NCP, are on the same page on trying to restrict Uddhav and his party.
Plans by Raj Thackeray to go it alone as well as that of the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi, led by Prakash Ambedkar, as well as several other smaller players are being attributed to the resourcefulness of the ruling side, which wants to cut the Opposition vote. The “vote katwas” are in great demand.
It is said that the ED and the CBI are also helping to keep many such players on the “right” path.
The challenge at hand, once put forth by the BJP’s top leader in the state, Devendra Fadnavis, is to raise the Mahayuti votes by 25 lakhs to cause an upset to the MVA. Narrowing the fight to just 25 lakh votes is a way to show the fight is just a child’s play.
The outcome in Maharashtra will have national ramifications. It will decide whether Narendra Modi is his own boss again or not. The Haryana hat-trick has helped him to regain composure after failing to get a majority in the Lok Sabha polls. But Haryana is seen as just an aberration.
So, in order to project that he has finally arrived, Mr Modi has to show that he has managed a victory in Maharashtra, the wealthiest state in the country. If he achieves this with ease, his stature will grow. and the naysayers or the Mr Doubtfuls will fall in line.
In order to accomplish this, Mr Modi has essentially opened the doors of Ali Baba’s cave to Marathi-speaking people and other citizens, including women, farmers, students and the youth, offering them treats they enjoy or find enjoyable to help them forget their dull lives.
In order to proclaim that it is once again “Amchi Mumbai”, Mr Modi is acting like Santa Claus in Maharashtra before Christmas, not to kids but to all voters, even those who are voting for the first time.
BJP strategists say that all the anger against the party in the wake of the roller-coaster political developments over the past three years is a thing of the past as people have given vent to it in the Lok Sabha polls. Now it is the time for a new beginning, and so the pre-Diwali goodies will brighten the BJP lamp, goes the argument.
The tussle for Maharashtra has turned into 288 individual battles in as many Assembly seats, and there is no overarching issue except the way governance went for a toss with the BJP engineering splits in two key regional parties for the sake of power.
This brand of politics is on test in middle-class Maharashtra. A weaker Mr Modi has a lot to ride on the back of mercurial Maharashtra. It is a cakewalk for no one.