The pressures of patchwork politics in Maharashtra

It is now more than a month since the Maharashtra government led by Uddhav Thackeray was ousted following mass desertion by party MLAs, including by as many as nine ministers. Something was happening inside the party that neither the Chief Minister then, nor his politician-son Aaditya or the particularly vocal party spokesperson and Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Raut had a clue about. The inner rumblings were evidently unseen and unheard.

Now, other kinds of rumblings are troubling the new patchwork alliance of the breakaway Shiv Sena faction and the BJP, with rebel Eknath Shinde as the Chief Minister. This new combination, guided and aided by the BJP, today sits uneasy. It faces a host of pressures from those who have switched sides with many hopes and promises that will not be easy to meet. A sign of this has been that the state government had not been able to announce a cabinet yet, one month into the formation of the new government.

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Since June 30, when Shinde took office, Maharashtra has been run by a micro non-cabinet of two (with Shinde as CM and the BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis as deputy CM) as the new power structure balances pressures and decides how to distribute the rewards of the ‘coup’. There are other uncomfortable adjustments that are taking time to work out. Among them is that the BJP has the largest share of MLAs (106 in a house of 288), and while it wants to prop up Shinde, its eventual goal is to build its people and their power bases. The BJP will look for a bigger share in power. Further, accommodating as many as 29 independent MLAs who support the Shinde faction with political positions will be difficult, if not impossible.

At the heart of this is the weak political position of the new Chief Minister, who certainly has enough BJP support but very little of his own story that he can take to the people of Maharashtra while all the other key players have their interests and story at work.

The BJP has divided and broken the Shiv Sena. Within it is a “we-told-you-so” story from the BJP – they promised to and have taught the son of Bal Thackeray, Uddhav, a lesson. Uddhav Thackeray, the deposed CM, has his story on how Eknath Shinde, a man he trusted, stabbed him in the back, just when he was recovering from surgery in hospital – an act not of rebellion but of betrayal of the worst kind that is not usually the stuff of the Shiv Sena.

Uddhav Thackeray’s son, Aaditya, who has attracted a lot of attention of the youth and liberals given his support on environment issues, has a subtler story of his own – the story of a new generation, learning and taking humble bows as he goes across the state to connect with the masses. Some of the responses have been powerful – people tearing up to welcome those who were betrayed. The only one who does not have a powerful story yet is Shinde, who will find it difficult to escape the obvious story that he got his seat by selling out to the BJP.

Making it worse for the victors is the fact that even Fadnavis, the BJP’s local leader and former CM, who had told reporters he would stay of of the new government, had to be directed by the party to join it as Shinde’s deputy. One view of the picture that emerged was of New Delhi playing the strings, and puppets dancing to the pull in Maharashtra.

This gives a new potential fillip to the idea on which the Shiv Sena was formed and rocketed upward in the public mind in the first place and even came under police watch given the violent approach it advocated – the politics of the “sons of the soil”. In the early days, the party led agitations to ask that Maharashtrian youth be employed by banks, railways, other large PSUs and private companies. The party has led countless hyper-local agitations – in bank branches, sometimes in the Western region headquarters in Mumbai, at the offices of the railway recruiting boards, and others. It was fighting for jobs for Maharashtrian youth.

On the other hand was the Shiv Sena’s work for the common man – fighting to get water connections re-started, roads fixed, even selling at low cost when others fleeced on ordinary goods and commodities – leading the late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan to once comment that the Shiv Sena does the right things the wrong way.

Rebellion is not unknown in the Shiv Sena. The party has seen rebellions – three of them big -- even during the time of Bal Thackeray. Among them was Uddhav’s cousin Raj Thackeray, who quit in 2005, when Bal Thackeray was alive. The party survived what looked then like tremors but turned out to be hiccups because of the way Thackeray moved crowds. “I have the remote control of politics and the remote control will remain with me,” Thackeray said in an editorial in the party newspaper Saamna when he turned 84, some two years before he passed away. The throngs of mourners at the funeral in Shivaji Park showed how much people loved him.

Aaditya Thackeray has started touring the state on a ‘Shiv Samvaad’ yatra. The message that is being taken to the people is about the backstabbing and betrayal of Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena. The attempt by the Thackerays is to reconnect with the people, to paper over charges of distance and inaccessibility, and to re-establish the connection that Bal Thackeray had with the Maharashtrian masses. In doing so, the Shiv Sena will somewhere be going back to its nativist roots, and at the same time signalling that they will fight back with force and vigour – something that will be difficult, now that all the resources of the government are trained against them. But betrayal for personal gain is a powerful story that has an emotional connection, and the Thackerays will be going all out to build it further in the hinterlands of Maharashtra.

(The writer is Managing Editor, The Billion Press) (Syndicate: The Billion Press)