Maharashtra polls 2014: Why Shiv Sena and BJP are better off without each other

Maharashtra polls 2014: Why Shiv Sena and BJP are better off without each other

One cannot be faulted if for the past two months and more the thought crossed the mind that Bharatiya Janata Party and the Shiv Sena were contesting against each other for the voters’ favour in the Maharashtra Assembly elections due in a few weeks from now.

Nor, for that matter, if the impression gaining ground was that the Congress and the Nationalistic Congress Party were waging a war against each other and not their rivals, the saffron parties. It was as if they were not in alliance, but locked in a tight embrace to squeeze out the political ambitions of the other.

They may yet end up contesting the elections as alliances partners with the BJP-Sena’s being, so far, the most enduring in India’s post-Independence political history. The Congress-NCP had fought each other and BJP-Sena in 1999 and then went in for a marriage of convenience.

The saffron combine had appeared to be a lovelock to the envy of other political formations which turned out, across the country, to be of a revolving door type. Friends turned into foes and turned again into friends, like Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar have in Bihar. On display these past two months was not a competitive intimacy between alliance partners but a bare-knuckled slugfest, each going at the other to claim a larger share of seats to contest in October. More seats you contest, greater the chances of winning more compared to the partner.

The party with a higher number of MLAs compared to the ally’s gets to be the chief minister, the runner-up settles for the deputy’s post, shadowing each other at public events. So much so, the deputy chief ministers turn morose if they don't get to answer questions in an inane press conference. In the bargain, we never knew which of the two partners is electorally stronger in both alliances.

The votes gathered by one included those coming from the partner’s supporters. The aggregates were thus a misleading indicator of their respective strengths. Even the party didn’t quite know where they actually stood. Only in the Lok Sabha polls, for the first time, was it clear that BJP was the motivating factor for the saffron alliance to have done remarkably well. It was Narendra Modi all the way and both stood to gain though Sena thinks it was their own USP which propelled it in politics.

Between the Congress and NCP, the feeling is that the former is the cause of its debacle in the Lok Sabha polls, never mind its own contribution to poor governance including, corruption, arrogance, and inaccessibility to the common man, delays and only patronage, in the state. Both were in the thick of it and both remain in denial.

Prakash Akolkar, politicial editor of Sakal newspaper, in his usually insightful column – non-Marathi readers miss his valuable perceptions – yesterday made a point. Since both alliances know the likely outcome of the polls ahead where Congress- NCP would bite the dust, the two sets may as well break up and contest against each other and prove their strength once and for all.

Both alliances are in a state best described as a bad marriage with little or no guts to go for a divorce which explains their sense of insecurity vis-à-vis the voter intent. It is as if each needed a prop, using the other disabled as a crutch, like in the 1964 movie Dosti where a physically challenged props the visually challenged. The BJP, Sena, Congress, and the NCP have their regional bastions, heir support bases and core voters but none have, except for the 1999 fight between the Congress and the breakaway NCP, the periodic reassessment has been missing. Strategic partnership cannot be run without knowing each other’s strengths. Mere presumptions are inadequate.

None of the parties have an even, continuous spread across the state and hence, going alone was an idea which Pramod Mahajan had firmed up two years before his death. He had argued that the sum of seats won by Sena and BJP in multi-cornered contests, especially such, would be the same as in alliance in the fray. Hence, like the two bitter rivals, Congress and NCP of 1999 could get together in a post-poll alliance, the BJP and Sena as ideological friends could easily do so after the 2009 polls with not much of loss but actually gain. Cadres of each party would have got adrenalin shots, helping parties to sustain their respective reach.

Unless there was a contest between the alliance partners, in constituencies where the other ruled the roost because of what is called ‘electoral merit’ – good candidate, cash, and workers – the non-contesting party settles for an effete rank and file. It is difficult to keep their enthusiasm alive. The intra-alliance headaches are worse than intra-party feuds, he had told me.

This Congress-NCP has broadly followed the Shiv Sena – BJP paradigm of the Sena getting 171 seats to contest and the BJP the 117 of the total 288. This generally weighed in favour of the party with a larger kitty for contests unless its hit rate happened to be worse than the partner’s. The BJP and the NCP have now staked a claim that evens the odds – 144 seats apiece.

Politics, especially electoral politics, does not enable adherence to such precise arithmetic and the successes and victories depend on the candidate and constituency it gets to fight from. From election to election there have been some minor changes but both Sena and the Congress do not want to give up being the ‘big brother’ partner.

True, BJP had hitherto been riding piggyback on the Sena, even when it came to organising a bandh in Mumbai. Only now, with advent of Narendra Modi on the national scene and the image Amit Shah of being a deliverer of seats for the party has it begun flexing its muscles claiming that it already has the six-pack. It won’t want to be a ‘hey, you!’ anymore.

But to do that, parties need courage. And if it means committing itself to a possible loss of potential power, they develop cold feet and knuckle down to the pressures of the partner. They lurch from one five-year-long bad marriage to another. But Congress and NCP have no such fear to fear, unless, notwithstanding the non-BJP parties gains in the post Lok Sabha Assembly bye-elections believe in miracles.

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