The lasting image of the Maharashtra assembly election held in 2019 soon after the Lok Sabha election is of an almost 80-year-old man, who had battled dissent and desertion of his followers to the ruling party in the state, speaking in the pouring rain to a crowd of nearly 50,000. It was the last meeting of the campaign and the speaker, Sharad Pawar, was speaking in Satara, the traditional seat of late Y.B. Chavan, his mentor and one of the tallest leaders of the state.
Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) president Sharad Pawar addresses a public meeting in the rain ahead of the Assembly elections, in Satara district of Maharashtra on October 18. Photo: File
Pawar today wears that mantle, of being the tallest leader of the state. The election that he is deeply engaged in now, will perhaps decide the pace as well as the direction of the politics of India’s richest state and of India. It will also decide his legacy and the future of his own party, the NCP.
Maharashtra is traditionally divided into six regions with the following distribution of assembly seats: the Vidarbha with 62 seats, Marathwada with 46 seats, the sugar cane belt of Western Maharashtra with 70 seats, Northern Maharashtra with 35 seats, Mumbai with 36 seats and Thane and Konkan (the Coastal belt) with 39 seats.
To understand the complexity of this assembly election we need to look at the vote share of the principal players and the way the alliances worked on the ground. In the Maharashtra assembly election of 2019, the then pre-poll alliance of NDA (with the BJP and the Shiv Sena) had a combined vote share of 42.7% of votes polled as against that of the UPA (Congress and NCP) which had about 33% of votes polled. Post the election results the NDA alliance split with the Shiv Sena led by Uddhav Thackeray seeking a fresh alliance with the Nationalist Congress Party and the Indian National Congress. This reconfiguration of alliances was a tectonic shift in the political firmament that resulted in the creation of Maha Vikas Aghadi (Grand Development Front) government.
This government lasted for about two and half years before the two major constituent parties of the MVA split one after the other and formed an alliance with the BJP. This new alliance, the Mahayuti (Grand Alliance) consisting of the the breakaway Shiv Sena led by Eknath Shinde formed the government with the BJP and the Ajit Pawar faction of Nationalist Congress Party. This government is now completing its term.
These two new alliances fought the recently concluded Lok Sabha election against each other and their vote shares throw up some interesting issues. The combined vote share of the MVA, which fought the election as part of the INDIA alliance polled 42.3% of votes. The NDA, which in Maharashtra in effect consisted of the BJP as principal partner and the two groups which had split away from Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party polled a marginally higher share of about 43.9% of votes. The rest of the votes went to other smaller parties and independent candidates. However, the higher percentage of votes for NDA did not translate into a higher number of seats. The INDIA alliance managed to win 30 of the total 48 seats and the NDA, despite its higher vote share, won only 17 seats; one seat was won by an independent candidate.
Also read: Maharashtra: A blow to BJP-NDA, A Shot in The Arm for MVA-INDIA
The region-wise breakdown of seats won tells an interesting story. The results of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections show that in Vidarbha, out of the 10 seats, the MVA won 7 seats while the Mahayuti won 3 seats. In the Marathwada region out of the total of 12 seats, the MVA won 7 seats while the Maha Yuti won only 1 seat. In Western Maharashtra, out of the 12 seats, the MVA won 7 seats and the Mahayuti won 4. In North Maharashtra out of the 6 seats went to the MVA and 2 to Mahayuti. In Konkan, however, only 1 of the 6 seats went to the MVA while the Mahayuti won 5. In the Mumbai region, out of the 6 seats, 4 went to the MVA and 2 were won bythe Mahayuti. Basically, the Maha Vikas Aghadi outperformed Mahayuti in every region of Maharashtra, except Konkan.
The individual voting percentage of the political parties explains part of the story of why such a result came from the polling booths. The BJP, the principle ruling party in the state, polled the same percentage of votes as in 2019 assembly elections, 26.4%. The Congress, the fulcrum of the INDIA alliance very marginally increased its vote share to 16.9 from 16.1 percent. The combined alliance partner vote share of the NDA was 16.6 with 13% for Shiv Sena (Shinde) and 3.6 for NCP (Ajit Pawar). As against this, the combined alliance partner vote share for INDIA alliance was 27.2% with Shiv Sena (UBT) getting 16.9% and 10.3% for Nationalist Congress Party (led by Shri. Sharad Pawar). Thus, the alliance partners did very well in their strong holds with some challenges being thrown only in the Konkan region. The Lok Sabha elections also witnessed the eclipse of the Ajit Pawar led NCP with his extremely low vote share.
Will this trend repeat in the 2024 assembly elections? What are the issues which this assembly election is going to revolve around? Some of the outlines of the issues are now becoming clearer.
Among them is the agitation of the Maratha community’s demand for reservations. This demand will certainly reverberate in the Marathwada region. The reaction of the other communities to this demand and how the political class handles it is also crucial in this context. Then there are the direct cash transfer schemes initiated by the Shinde government, especially aimed at women, and it remains to be seen if this will have any traction among voters. Primarily, the central question of this election is, to what extent the logic of the new alliances is going to be acceptable to the people of the state.
While on paper these alliances have firmed up and the final negotiations and seat adjustments have more or less been decided, in effect, the election in all probability is being fought differently in each of the six regions of the state. This is because each alliance partner is perceived to be strong in their respective arenas and areas and no pan-regional strong player has emerged. Unlike the 2019 parliament and assembly elections where the NDA had a commanding presence across all the regions of the state, this time round, each of the individual parties are going to test their strength in their strongholds even if as a part of a larger alliance, with the MVA holding an edge collectively across the board. Thus, the ability of the alliance partners to seamlessly facilitate the transfer of votes on the ground to another alliance member is crucial. The MVA demonstrated this in the Lok Sabha elections in five out of six regions of the state.
However, state legislature elections tend to have a flavour of their own. We need to see how this election pans out in all of the six regions of the state. There is also one other element that needs to be considered. In the past three decades, Maharashtra has not witnessed single party rule. The Congress party stranglehold on the state was broken when the first Sena-BJP alliance came to power in 1995. This changed in 1999 as the Congress, in alliance with Nationalist Congress party, ruled the state for 15 years from 1999 to 2014. That rule as well as the unbroken Congress party rule over the state at least from 1985 onwards had the sure and steady and often decisive hand of the same person whose rain-soaked image stands inscribed on the minds of the people. This election may turn out to be about Sharad Pawar and his quest to once again occupy the political centre in the state and in the country.
Ajay Vishwas Dandekar is faculty at the Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence and Shriranjan Awate is faculty at the Savitribai Phule Pune University. The views here are their own.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.