Riding high on the numbers more than 200 in the lower house of 288, the NDA triplets Eknath Shinde, Devendra Fadnavis and Ajit Pawar didn’t have much to worry about in the monsoon session of the legislature. The upper house did tremble a bit, but that was all for a day or two. It also turned out to be the rare session that didn’t have an opposition leader in the Assembly for the entire period, barring the last two days on which a senior Congress leader Vijay Wadettiwar led from the front. It is his second consecutive term as the Opposition leader that has come to him in the time of crisis, as was his first brief stint in 2019.

Wadettiwar will have two more sessions, Nagpur’s winter in December and the budget in Mumbai, to be held in February-March before the Lok Sabha elections, to leave an impression even as the Opposition has pledged to fight the BJP and its allies, the old and new, together. Unaffected yet by splits and detections, the Congress may have got an upper hand over its fractured allies—the Shiv Sena (UBT) and Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar).