Maharashtra muddle: What choice do voters have in 2024 Assembly election?

Harold Wilson was wrong. To paraphrase him, a month is not a long time in Maharashtra politics; it’s an eternity, and it is a messy one.

The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), headed by four-time state chief minister and former Union defence and agriculture minister Sharad Pawar, has been vertically cleaved between June 10 — when the 83-year-old party chief appointed his daughter and Baramati MP Supriya Sule as working president — and July 2, when his nephew Ajit Pawar left the party along with his loyal legislators, including Praful Patel, who was appointed working president along with Sule, to join the BJP-Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde) government as its second deputy chief minister.

The question everyone is asking is, “What does this mean for the five key parties in the state — the BJP, the two Shiv Senas (led respectively by current chief minister Eknath Shinde and former chief minister Uddhav Thackeray), the NCP and the Congress?” This is a wrong question. The question that everyone should be asking is, what choice do voters have when the state goes to the polls towards the end of 2024?

Ideologies dead

Opportunistic politics has trumped ideologies — some say even morality, but then, expecting morality from a modern-day politician is a fool’s errand. Since the October 2019 Assembly elections, Maharashtra has had to face several tumultuous four years – first, due to the battle between the BJP and its ally, the unified Shiv Sena, over rotational chief ministership (2.5 years each was the Shiv Sena formula which the BJP rejected saying it never promised such a deal), leading to the most unlikely of alliances — the Congress, the NCP and the Sena, with Thackeray as chief minister, called the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (Maharashtra Development Front), MVA for short.

Also Read: Maharashtra NCP crisis: Will Sharad Pawar win the war to reclaim his party?

Then, from 2020, it was COVID-19 when Maharashtra recorded not only the highest number of cases in the country but also the most fatalities.

Just when the state was recovering from the pandemic, the Eknath Shinde coup took place, and several legal battles later, the Election Commission agreed to recognise his party and allocated a symbol.

Exactly a year after Shinde took over as chief minister, Ajit Pawar decided to defect and create an entirely new political situation for the state.

Assembly numbers

Remember that the BJP-Sena combine had won 161 seats (105 BJP and 56 Sena) in the 288-seat Assembly, while the MVA together had 154 seats (56 Sena, 54 NCP and 44 Congress).

These numbers are important to set the context for what is happening in July 2023, and what is likely to happen for the next 16 months until the next election.

The BJP is looking for a strong (and dependable) local partner in Maharashtra for the 2024 Lok Sabha election, which is likely to be held in the summer of that year. Eknath Shinde, whom BJP lured away from Uddhav Thackeray after many decades of loyal service to the original Shiv Sena, is not someone the BJP prefers.

This is because of two reasons: one, in spite of the apparent bonhomie whenever he is on stage with deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis of the BJP, there is a massive trust gap between the two. Second, Shinde does not have mass appeal beyond his constituency of Thane where he has an enormous base. He is not a vote-puller.

Ajit Pawar’s appeal

Ajit Pawar, on the other hand, has statewide appeal and administrative experience, having been Maharashtra deputy chief minister five times, including the latest tenure. Ajit has more to lose by not going with the BJP than Shinde, who can, theoretically, return to the Sena fold by merging the two factions. Thackeray and Shinde need each other more than the two Pawars. The senior Pawar will be in no mood to get Ajit back because it will jeopardise his daughter’s position. Besides, he has lost two of his most trusted aides — Praful Patel and Chhagan Bhujbal, who are the party’s moneybags.

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The BJP is acutely aware of this. Therefore, it will most likely dump Shinde (possibly through a disqualification) and go with Ajit as the chief minister because the latter will not only bring in more MLAs but will also be an effective countermeasure against a possible MVA alliance for the 2024 polls.

Let’s go back to the 2019 numbers for a bit. Of the 54 NCP MLAs, the Ajit faction seems to have 30 (including him) as of July 5, while the elder Pawar has 17. These were the MLAs at the respective meetings called soon after the crisis unfolded. There is no word from the remaining seven. Five of the eight NCP Members of the Legislative Council (MLCs) could also align with Ajit rather than Sharad. Ajit claims that he will eventually have 40-plus MLAs on his side.

If this is indeed the case, then the NCP in its original form is done for, and BJP will have a clear path ahead of both the state elections and the upcoming Mumbai municipal (BMC) polls, where Shiv Sena currently has a slim majority. The Mumbai municipal election will be crucial because it will be the first big poll to be fought with the complex equations arising after the Ajit Pawar defection.

Also read: Can Sharad Pawar, master of political manoeuvring, save NCP from brink of collapse?

Seat allocation negotiations for the Assembly polls will, in all likelihood, begin only after the BMC elections, which are currently on hold.

Blow to voter

In the drama that has been staged in Maharashtra since October 2019, it is evident that the voter has been the ultimate loser. She voted for a chosen party based on ideology and perceived performance, but neither of it will be on canvassing platforms in any of the forthcoming elections.

Both the NCP and the Shiv Sena are unrecognizable, and the BJP’s self-built image of a non-crooked party has been laid to waste, given its shenanigans to get back into power at all costs – first with Shinde in June 2022 and with Ajit Pawar in July 2023. The Congress, despite a thumping win in Karnataka, has become like the middle child no one pays attention to. In Maharashtra, it is a silent spectator at best and an irrelevant variable at worst.

In this context, therefore, the voter will have to not only choose carefully, but also remain extra vigilant for any new coalitions or groupings that were not envisaged. She should also demand accountability, but that is a debate for another day.

(Sachin Kalbag, a veteran editor of leading newspapers for nearly three decades, is currently Senior Fellow, Takshashila Institution.)

(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal.)