Why Siddique’s murder weakens Ajit Pawar, boosts BJP-Sena’s poll prospects
Cold-blooded murder of Muslim leader may present a token of majoritarian assertion to be milked by Hindutva parties; it also takes attention away from Shivaji statue collapse
Murders are often clubbed together with insanity. But, when a political player is killed in cold blood, it may not be so simple.
The ghastly assassination of Baba Ziauddin Siddique in downtown Mumbai is a case in point. It not only calls for a closer look at the kind of politics he was caught up in, but also the timing of the murder, which comes just ahead of the Maharashtra Assembly polls.
Tricky case
So far, no clear motive for the crime has been worked out by Mumbai police except for the claim that the former Maharashtra minister was shot dead on October 12 by hired killers for a sum of around Rs 2 lakh. But who paid this to get rid of him is yet to be known, and the chances of hitting upon this are bleak.
This is because killings for money often involve a chain of persons between the actual assassins and their gangs; it may also have a string of hands between the starting point of the payoffs and the gang that carried out the murder.
The dirty money’s murky trail often gets snapped when one or two links in the chain go missing. Police have to act really fast to prevent this.
Likely to take time
But in the case of Siddique, it is too early to jump to any such conclusion or even a possibility with any degree of surety.
Investigations in the case may still take some more time as Mumbai’s public life, of which the 66-year-old former lawmaker of West Bandra was so actively a part of for over four long decades, wouldn’t wait.
More so since the Maharashtra Assembly elections will take place on November 20, even before the beleaguered state gets over the trauma of the gruesome incident.
Ruling politicians not safe
The question that arises out of Siddique’s murder is — if polls could be held peacefully in a restive region like Jammu and Kashmir, what led to the killing of a prominent politician in the country’s biggest metropolis just ahead of the announcement of poll dates?
And more so, when the deceased had reported a threat to his life only a couple of weeks before the murder.
Siddique belonged to the ruling coalition in the badly-truncated politics of Maharashtra. He had crossed over a few months back from the Congress to the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) led by Ajit Pawar.
All-pervasive fear
The NCP is part of the Mahayuti alliance led by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde’s faction of Shiv Sena, where the BJP is another significant constituent. Together, these parties, and their leaders, were supposed to be more secure and safe than their peers in the Opposition, at least in Mumbai.
Siddique’s case has proved that this is not the case. It has, in fact, exposed the vulnerability of the state’s politicians. So much so that there is marked consternation and outrage over the NCP leader’s assassination among the political class of the state and beyond.
The fear is now so palpable that Maharashtra police personnel have a daunting task before them in providing security cover to scores of candidates contesting the polls and VIPs of all hues crisscrossing the state during the polls.
Shifts in Maharashtra politics
It is thus normal that the air is febrile as Maharashtra gears up for polls. Can this be so without a reason? Is it not the time to keep one’s fingers crossed and stay away from electoral campaigns, which in any case bring little change?
And when it does, it gets from bad to worse. At least the recent history of governments being made and unmade in Maharashtra proves this.
Successive fallouts among the Sena and NCP satraps shaped the current Maharashtra dispensation. In the latter’s case, it was not just a political breakup; it went on to create a family feud.
Earlier, the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition government of Uddhav Thackeray — comprising the undivided Shive Sena with the Congress and Sharad Pawar’s NCP — was refered to as an 'unholy alliance'.
Fear of probe agencies
After an internal feud in the Sena that split the party, there was a split in the NCP as well. It was amid such bickering that Siddique followed in the footsteps of his peers, cutting across parties, to make the grade and to be on the right side of the more consequential among Maharashtra’s powers-that-be after losing the 2019 Assembly polls.
What prompted such shifts, at least in the case of Ajit Pawar, who became Maharashtra’s Deputy Chief Minister, is the lurking fear of Central probe agencies.
To escape Delhi’s long arms for the fiscal misdemeanours of the past, some of Maharashtra’s leaders joined the BJP or aligned with the party in a tizzy so as to be on the state’s ruling side forged by the BJP.
So much so that after the BJP faced electoral reverses in several Maharashtra constituencies in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the RSS called the NDA’s decision to allow Ajit Pawar to hop onto the Mahayuti bandwagon an electoral mistake.
Ajit Pawar on wobbly grounds
Ajit Pawar had taken Baba Siddique and others under his wings hoping to cut into some of the Congress’ votes in the Siddiques’ Mumbai stronghold. But, with the Muslim leader's sudden death, Maharashtra’s politics has taken an unexpected turn.
Siddique’s former Congress colleagues are crying foul more fiercely than Ajit Pawar and his party cohorts.
Clearly, Ajit Pawar has been put on a weak footing following Siddique’s assassination. His helplessness shows that Maharashtra politics is once again veering towards the old game of sharpening of polarisation on communal and sectarian lines amid fears of violence.
Also read: Baba Siddique murder: Why cops are probing slum rehab project link
Muslims are not only soft targets in this, but also their plight serves as a token of majoritarian assertion which can well bring electoral dividends to the Hindutva brand of politics.
Advantage BJP-Sena
So, Ajit Pawar’s allies i.e. the BJP and the Shinde-led Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, stand to benefit from the current uncertainties more than the NCP or Ajit Pawar in next month’s electoral race against the Opposition's INDIA bloc of parties.
It can well be so since Shinde and BJP were until recently facing public opprobrium because of the crumbling of a statue ofmedieval era Maratha warrior Shivaji, which was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Now, the attention has shifted to the murder of a former MLA.