Indicating the dramatic matrix of coalitions and micro-management of constituencies, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) vote share of 26.8% in the Maharashtra assembly elections is only nominally higher than the 26.18% votes it received in the Lok Sabha polls. A party that faced a rout in the general elections in the state reached tantalisingly close to the majority on its own in the assembly.
If there’s one common factor in the results of Maharashtra and Jharkhand, it is the success of coalitions. In Jharkhand, the Jan Mukti Morcha-led coalition parties triumphed over their rivals, even marking a comeback of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD). In Maharashtra, the BJP and its partners, Ajit Pawar and Eknath Shinde, trounced the Congress, Sharad Pawar and Uddhav Thackeray. Such was the craft that the BJP made at least five of its leaders quit the party, join the Shiv Sena and NCP and contest on their tickets.
The BJP’s margin in Maharashtra does appear surprising, but Shinde wasn’t as unpopular as the opposition perceived him to be. A CSDS-Lokniti survey before the elections noted that in public perception, the Shinde government fared better on many essential indices than Uddhav Thackeray’s had.
The assembly election also marks the end of Sharad Pawar’s politics, leaving the mantle to Supriya Sule, as well as a challenge for Aditya Thackeray, a scenario that exposes their already vulnerable ranks.
The results should also conclusively end the myth of the Muslim vote, and perhaps of ‘Muslim politics’, at least for the foreseeable future. In June, Devendra Fadnavis had attributed the party’s loss in the LS polls to “vote jihad”, completely ignoring the fact that neither the MVA nor the Mahayuti had given a ticket to a single Muslim in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
Fadnavis also ignored the fact that the BJP had actually performed better during the 2024 general elections in comparison to the 2019 assembly poll in 20 of the 38 assembly segments where Muslims are more than 20 percent of the population. In 2019, the BJP won only 11 of these 38 seats. This year it won 14. The saffron party led the tally in both years, achieving the highest count by any party in Muslim-majority constituencies.
The only seat that Asaduddin Owaisi ‘s All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) could win this year is the heavily-Muslim dominated Malegaon Central, that too with a wafer-thin margin of 162 votes, the narrowest in the state. Compare this with the Mahayuti’s average victory margin of over 40,000 votes.
The carefully crafted perception of a solid and unified Muslim vote ignores, perhaps deliberately, that the vote was always divided between the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party, Congress and now AIMIM. What has emerged after 2014 is that a ‘Muslim seat’ often witnesses Hindu polarisation around the BJP’s candidate, drastically reducing the chances of a Muslim winning. Exhibit A: AIMIM’s Maharashtra president Imtiaz Jaleel lost to the BJP in Muslim-dominated Aurangabad East. Exhibit B is the Muslim-dominated Kundarki that went to bypolls in UP. The BJP’s Ramveer Singh was against as many as 11 Muslim candidates. He got 170,371 votes, with his nearest rival SP’s Mohammad Rijwan securing a paltry 25,580 and seven others receiving less than 800 votes. In fact, the 11 Muslim candidates together polled just around 50,000 votes – i.e. 1,20,000 less than what Ramveer mopped up.
The BJP’s failure to wrest Jharkhand may offer some relief to the opposition. The BJP’s agenda of turning Adivasi communities against the Muslims failed, as it could win only one of the 28 ST seats in Jharkhand, that too JMM’s turncoat Champai Soren from Saraikela. But it would be foolhardy to read this as the defeat of communal politics. The BJP’s deployment of the Assam and UP chief ministers in Jharkhand and Maharashtra is a wider and cynical strategy that it will continue to employ to the hilt in coming elections. The strategy may not have worked in Jharkhand, but many other regions of India may succumb to it. Yes, the BJP lost more than 60 seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, but to assume this signals a decline of Hindutva forces is an overestimation that only a complacent opposition could afford.
The slogan ‘Batenge to Katenge’ effectively pits Hindus against an imagined enemy, Muslims, while failing to address the social and economic injustices faced by Hindus at the bottom rungs of the deeply entrenched caste system. The BJP’s politics, now firmly entrenched across the country, needs to be contested by sustained groundwork by the opposition, for which the Congress still remains the only feasible umbrella. But is the party prepared?
On the eve of the assembly results, with the winter session of parliament just a day away, leader of the opposition Rahul Gandhi chose to take a holiday near Shimla, instead of addressing the pressing questions about his party’s rout in Maharashtra. In December 2013, when the Congress lost the three states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, a loss that marked its downslide, Gandhi famously said that he was going to reform Congress in ways one can’t even imagine.
One can blame the powerful deep state, which firmly controls various central agencies for its political gains, but the responsibility for Congress’s revival lies solely with the party. Without it, the BJP will only grow stronger.
