Coming soon, Face-Off 2.0

NCP chief Sharad Pawar and Devendra Fadnavis, BJP leader

The election results of the five states, of which four were retained by the Bharatiya Janata Party, has impacted Maharashtra's politics as well. The Holi weekend was marked by political resolutions coming from the MVA and the BJP. While the BJP's in-charge of Goa victory, Devendra Fadnavis and Union minister Nitin Gadkari have projected a single-handed victory for their party in the next state Assembly polls, the architect of the Maha Vikas Aghadi, Sharad Pawar, has assured that he would not allow the opposition to come back. A sweeping victory in Punjab has given the Aam Aadmi Party's Maharashtra unit a new confidence to find footing in the state. The distressed Congress here has put up a brave face, reinvesting its loyalty in the Gandhi family's leadership for putting up a fight against the BJP, and if required, against any other adversary.

BJP leaders have attributed the party's success to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Centre's schemes that the respective state governments have taken to the beneficiaries, creating a new section of voters beyond communal and caste lines. Hindutva has remained a constant in the party's campaign in Maharashtra and elsewhere in the country. Simultaneously, the campaign revolved around other factors that helped it blunt anti-incumbency in four states, most importantly in Uttar Pradesh, which, with the victory, has boosted the BJP's prospects ahead of its 2024 New Delhi campaign. The BJP had managed to negate anti-incumbency in Maharashtra as well, when, together with the Shiv Sena, it won a majority in 2019. But, the Sena left the BJP, turning the state's politics upside down.

Sena president Uddhav Thackeray leads the three-party government, relegating the aggrieved single-largest party to the Opposition benches. In such a scenario, the BJP's campaign in Maharashtra has been different from other states because it is not in power here, whereas the MVA plank is mostly the same as other anti-BJP parties, which were in the Opposition. Unlike the current ruling parties in Maharashtra, they did not face the disadvantage of anti-incumbency. But, it seems the potential use of anti-incumbency by opponents does not bother Pawar much, because Maharashtra had three back-to-back NCP-Congress alliance governments till the Modi wave propelled the BJP beyond a 120-mark in 2014. When it goes solo in the next polls, the BJP will have to be much ahead in the numbers game.

Maharashtra is the next important state after UP in terms of the number of MPs it sends. Unlike UP, where the Assembly polls take place two years before the Lok Sabha polls, Maharashtra's polls happen six months after the general elections. Assuming impossibility of mid-term Assembly polls, the Lok Sabha results will indicate the voting trend in Maharashtra. Ahead of the general elections, the local self-government polls, slated for this year but delayed because of the OBC quota glitch, will have strategists working overtime. It may help MVA parties decide whether they contest as a collective force or split anti-BJP votes.

The unity experiments in UP have failed in the past, and this year, the elections turned out to be a bipolar fight between the BJP and Samajwadi Party, despite two others - the Congress and Bahujan Samaj Party - in the fray. In this context, Maharashtra's local self-government polls, the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha are expected to be even more interesting, depending on the integration and disintegration of political forces. The AIMIM, which was accused of being the BJP's Team-B in UP, has asked whether it will be allowed to prove the allegation wrong by joining the MVA's pre-poll alliance. The response to the AIMIM's appeal doesn't assure any positive progress. But isn't politics indefinite? It could be anything - a straight one between the MVA versus the BJP, or a multi-corner fight, say pundits, who also predict a pre-poll alliance between any of the two MVA partners, if the third one is not willing to join in.

Promising to be a lone ranger, yet the winner, the BJP has sounded the bugle. Taking up the challenge, Sharad Pawar has raised the baton yet again to conduct the MVA choir.

Dharmendra Jore is political editor, mid-day. He tweets @dharmendrajore
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