Maharashtra is the BJP’s unfulfilled dream. It is the only state in western India where it has not been able to run a government on its own. That dream may get fulfilled in 2029, Home Minister Amit Shah told his party workers during a pep talk last month in Mumbai.
This time, the BJP has to rely once again on the Mahayuti coalition, which includes the Eknath Shinde faction of the Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar faction of the Nationalist Congress Party. In 2014, Devendra Fadnavis became the first BJP chief minister to rule Maharashtra when he formed a government in alliance with the undivided Shiv Sena. Five years later, he came tantalisingly close to extending his stay at Varsha, the official residence of the chief minister, till Shiv Sena supremo Uddhav Thackeray decided to occupy it with the help of the Congress and the NCP.
Since then, Varsha has eluded the BJP as it allowed Shinde to take charge as chief minister of the Mahayuti coalition. Who will have the keys to Varsha in 2024? According to Shah, the BJP will certainly have it in 2029. But for 2024, coalition dharma may decide Varsha’s next occupant, be it someone from the Mahayuti alliance or the Maha Vikas Aghadi, even though the BJP and the Congress are contesting the maximum number of seats in their respective groupings.
The BJP is expected to contest more than half of the 288 seats in Maharashtra. In 2019, it contested 152 seats. The party has to deal with anti-incumbency caused by farmers’ distress and anger from the Maratha community fuelled by demands for reservation. There are voters who are upset with the BJP for the role it played in splitting the Shiv Sena and the NCP. The possibility of a non-Maratha chief minister could also hurt the party. Many BJP workers and supporters are upset about the alliance with Ajit Pawar, whom the party had attacked in the past. And the BJP is still reeling from the INDIA bloc’s allegation that it has plans to rewrite the Constitution.
The biggest comforting factor for the BJP is that in the last two assembly polls, it had won more than 100 seats, the only party to do so in the state in three decades. It has taken a leaf out of its Madhya Pradesh strategy―wooing voters with welfare schemes―which paid rich dividends. The BJP was widely expected to lose Madhya Pradesh owing to anti-incumbency in 2023, but the party managed a remarkable turnaround after banking on women voters through the Ladli Behna scheme, launched ahead of the polls. Chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan promised to give Rs1,000 for women between 18 to 65 and later increased it to Rs1,250. The scheme worked wonders for the party as it won its biggest-ever mandate in the state, and the feat was replicated recently in Haryana where the party promised women Rs2,100.
In Maharashtra, Shinde announced the Ladki Bahin Yojna in August, offering Rs1,500 per month for women aged between 21 and 60. Just before the election schedule was announced, the government declared advance Diwali bonus of Rs3,000 for beneficiaries of the scheme for two months. To boost the economy and provide jobs, the Shinde government sanctioned some big-ticket infrastructure projects, such as the Rs76,200-crore Vadhvan port project, making it largest port in the country. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made multiple trips to the state to announce new projects, which the BJP hopes will work in its favour.
The BJP has retained the same team of strategists it had in Madhya Pradesh―Union Ministers Bhupender Yadav and Ashwini Vaishnaw―to oversee election management. “In 2019, the mandate was for the BJP-led coalition. Unfortunately, [it did not happen] because of the backstabbing by Uddhav Thackeray,” said party spokesperson Tuhin Sinha. “Our objective is to ensure that we get justice, which was denied to us in 2019, and install a BJP-led government.”
In the Lok Sabha polls, though the difference in vote share between the MVA and the Mahayuti alliance was miniscule, there was a huge difference in the number of seats. The MVA won 30 of 48 seats as the Mahayuti suffered losses in the Marathwada and the Vidarbha regions. If those results were to be extrapolated into leads in assembly segments, the MVA would win 158 seats. However, the MVA’s victory margin was negligible in about three dozen seats, making the upcoming polls really competitive.
If the BJP’s social welfare push has a Madhya Pradesh connection, its social engineering resembles the strategy it employed in Haryana, where the dominant caste, the Jats, were angry with the party just as the Marathas are unhappy in Maharashtra. After consultation with the RSS, the BJP is focusing on a Maratha-OBC consolidation against the Maratha, dalit and Muslim pitch of the MVA. Maratha activist Manoj Jarange Patil has announced that he would contest the polls, which the BJP hopes would divide the anti-government votes.
The BJP is using a polarising slogan which it employed successfully in Haryana. Citing instances of Hindus getting targeted in Bangladesh following the ouster of prime minister Sheikh Hasina, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had used the slogan, batenge toh katenge (if we are divided, we will be destroyed), during the Haryana polls, which helped the BJP electorally. The same slogan is being used in Maharashtra and BJP leaders say that it is gaining “organic traction”. The murder of former minister Baba Siddique has added to the communal polarisation.
Where the BJP’s Maharashtra strategy differs from Madhya Pradesh and Haryana is in the selection of candidates. The party is likely to retain most of its MLAs unlike in those two states where it changed sitting MLAs to fight anti-incumbency. This strategy draws from Maharashtra’s Lok Sabha poll experience where dropping of MPs did not pay off.
The Maharashtra battle is the second biggest contest for the BJP after the Lok Sabha polls. Controlling Maharashtra translates into political and economic heft. The BJP needs to win Maharashtra to compensate for its lacklustre performance in the Lok Sabha polls and carry forward the momentum after the Haryana victory. A loss in Maharashtra would hit it hard in the perception battle across the country.