Mumbai: On June 5, a day after the parliamentary election results, Maharashtra deputy chief minister and senior leader of Bharatiya Janata Party, Devendra Fadnavis conceded his “failure” in the state.
The party, after much struggle, managed to win only nine out of the total 28 seats it contested in Maharashtra. While listing out the reasons for the party’s debacle, Fadnavis has offered to resign and said that he would rather focus on rebuilding the party’s morale in the state for the upcoming assembly election, that likely to happen at the end of this year.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
This was perhaps the worst show put up by the BJP under Fadnavis’s leadership. In 2019, the party had given a spectacular performance, winning 22 out of the total 25 seats contested. But even then, success was short lived. Fadnavis had failed to secure the party’s long running coalition with the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena and even though the BJP had numbers, they had to sit in the opposition. Thackeray formed a government along with the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party. This was eventually felled.
Fadnavis might have failed to built and secure a healthy equation with party allies but has never before been accused of failing to lead the party. This time, as he conceded defeat, there are murmurs in the party that the top leadership in Delhi and also a few seasoned leaders in the state are unhappy with the former chief minister. His offer to resign could be due to this pressure.
There are multiple factors that attributed to BJP’s defeat in the state.
Since 2019, Maharashtra has had one of the most dramatic and unstable governments in the country. This had had a bearing on the minds of voters too. The final straw seems to have been when Ajit Pawar broke out of the Sharad Pawar-led NCP and joined the BJP-led government. Also, BJP went on an overdrive to collect leaders with chequered pasts from the opposition. Through the election season, voters were heard saying that they no longer know which candidate is contesting from which party. This anger with the disintegration of political parties in the state was all trained towards the BJP.
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In the press conference, Fadnavis said the BJP failed to intervene when the farmers were facing crisis in the state, especially those growing soybean and cotton. He claimed that the party was not able to do much owing to the Model Code of Conduct. But the anger among the farming community is not recent. The policies of the party at the Centre and the failure of the state leadership in bailing the farmers from crisis over the past decade has acted as a major splinter. The marginalised farmers, who mostly have Bahujan caste identities and are dependent on welfare schemes, went against the BJP.
Similarly, the landed Maratha community too had an axe to grind against the party this time, as BJP failed to offer any concrete solution to their demand for reservation for the community in the state. The impact of this is clearly seen in the Marathwada and Vidarbha region, when the BJP performed its worst this election.
Lack of employment opportunities for the youth and recruitment scams further compounded the party’s troubles.
The BJP, when it went into the fray, was confident that its two-year-old partner Eknath Shinde – who led the Shiv Sena – would be able to get the necessary numbers. But Shinde, along with the comfortable wins for his son in Kalyan and another seat in Thane, managed to win only five more. Shinde was up against the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena. Thackeray was riding on the sympathy wave of losing both the party name and the symbol to Shinde and his stellar performance as the chief minister of the state during the COVID- 19 pandemic.
When Shinde broke the Sena and took away almost all the party MLAs and some MPs to join hands with the BJP, he had promised to cut Thackeray down to size in the state. That didn’t happen. The ruling Mahayuti alliance picked on Thackeray and made allegations of several frauds in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) which the party ran for two decades. Many from the Thackeray side were grilled and his close aid Sanjay Raut was even jailed. None of these tactics worked. In Mumbai, in fact, the Thackeray faction managed to secure wins in three out of the four seats it contested. Thackeray’s Sena also worked overtime to support Congress’ candidate Varsha Gaikwad in Mumbai North Central. The one seat that the Thackeray candidate lost in Mumbai was by a very narrow margin of 48 votes.
Shinde’s Sena lost two of the three seats in the city, making it amply clear that the voters are still with Thackeray.
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The worst performing, however, is Ajit Pawar, whose NCP faction managed to secure just one seat. Despite being a part of the ruling alliance, taking away both party name and symbol, Ajit Pawar’s fielded candidates put up an abysmal performance. His wife Sunetra who contested from home turf Baramati against Supriya Sule, Ajit Pawar’s cousin and daughter of Sharad Pawar, lost the election. Ajit Pawar had been stationed in Pune and closely handled his wife’s election campaign.
A year ago, Ajit Pawar, imitating Shinde, suddenly broke the NCP and took away several senior leaders with him. His decision had diminished the power and reach of the Sharad Pawar’s faction in the state. But this favouring arrangement was short lived. Senior leaders though went with Ajit Pawar, they feel sidelined in their new alliance with the BJP. When the BJP-led state government spoke of providing Kunbi (an OBC caste in Maharashtra) status to the Marathas, senior minister Chhagan Bhujbal openly criticised the government. As a vocal, prominent leader of the OBC communities, Bhujbal even arranged rallies in the state.
In the press conference on June 5, Fadnavis while conceding defeat, also claimed that there has been “coordination issues” with the two allies. The issues that Fadnavis spoke of are not one-sided. Leaders from Ajit Pawar’s faction are already blaming the BJP and Shinde for Sunetra Pawar’s defeat. NCP leader Amol Mitkari claimed that in Baramati, the party had expected to “sail through” but cadres of Mahayuti allies BJP and the Shiv Sena did not work for the victory of the party’s candidate. “Whatever votes we got (in Baramati) was due to Ajit Pawar’s individual efforts,” he claimed.
Read all of The Wire’s reporting on and analysis of the 2024 election results here.
