Mumbai: “This was not a wave but a tsunami. How did we reach here? How did the verdict come out like this? I cannot make sense of this,” said an ostensibly dejected Uddhav Thackeray. His party, Shiv Sena (Uddhav Bal Thackeray), had won 16 seats by 6.30 pm, with a lead in another four. For Thackeray’s party, which contested 89 seats and managed to retain only 22% of total seats, this was a struggle for existence.
Earlier in the day, his party’s senior leader Sanjay Raut had posted on X against the results and demanded re-elections, this time on the ballot paper. “The result of Maharashtra is not the voice of the people,” he wrote on social media.
What the party thinks, feels, or has to say now appears immaterial. A clear mandate was given today to the Mahayuti alliance, with the Bharatiya Janata Party making a big gain. By around 6.30 pm, when Thackeray was making his speech, the BJP had won 84 seats and was leading in another 49. The Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar-led NCP also made a massive comeback, leading in 57 and 41 seats, respectively. The other smaller allies include Rashtriya Samaj Paksha (RSP), Republican Party of India (Athawale), Shiv Sangram, and Rayat Kranti Sanghatana. This performance, by their own admission, has outdone the BJP’s performance in the 2014 and 2019 elections, when the “Narendra Modi wave” had swept the national and state political landscapes.
The assembly election came only a few months after the general elections, in which the Mahavikas Aghadi, comprising the Congress, Thackeray’s Sena, and Sharad Pawar-led NCP, had put on a massive show. The overall tally of the Congress improved, primarily because of the 14 seats the party won in the state. However, in these assembly elections, the party barely managed to secure 15 seats out of the 103 seats it contested.
The party delivered its worst performance this time. Even in 2014, amidst the “Modi wave,” Congress had managed to secure 40 seats. In 2019, despite the absence of national leaders campaigning for the party, Congress had won 44 seats on its own.
In 2014, the BJP had swept Vidarbha by winning 44 out of 62 assembly seats. In 2019, its tally from Vidarbha dropped to 29 seats, pulling down its overall numbers in the state. The party was confident of a revival in Vidarbha and it saw the Lok Sabha results as the first step. But today, the farm distress narrative which the Congress was banking on heavily, seems to have made little to no impact.
And yet, national leaders had not abandoned the party as they did in 2014. All the big leaders, from Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge to Rahul Gandhi to Priyanka Gandhi, campaigned for the party’s candidates, along with its allies’ candidates.
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The party leaders have claimed they will be “introspecting” the loss in the coming days. Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala, the party’s in-charge for Maharashtra, said at a press conference that the results are both unbelievable and unacceptable. “I have been in politics for 38 years. I have never seen such a result ever before. People have been distressed, we have seen the ground reality for so long. We can’t trust this verdict,” Chennithala said.
Among the MVA, however, the worst performing is Sharad Pawar’s party. Of the 87 candidates fielded, the party is managing a win on only 10 seats. His grand-nephew Yugendra, for whom Sharad Pawar had campaigned across the Baramati constituency, lost against his uncle Ajit by a margin of over one lakh votes. Yugendra, in one of his interviews, had claimed that he was an “accidental politician”. His entry into politics was entirely planned and executed by Sharad Pawar, whose seniority, planning and execution have earned him the moniker of “Chanakya” of Indian politics. But his strategies failed today.
Sharad Pawar has not responded to the debacle as yet. Amid severe challenges, his party had been able to win eight out of the 16 seats it had contested in the parliamentary election. But it has had little luck this time.
His party has consistently faced the challenge of taking the party symbol to its voters. It is important to note that as many as 163 independent candidates were allotted a trumpet symbol, which were very close to the symbol of the Sharad Pawar faction of the NCP party – a man blowing a trumpet. Of these 163 independent candidates, as many as 78 contested seats where Sharad Pawar’s party candidates were in the fray. Of them, seven were namesakes of the NCP (Sharad Pawar) party candidates.
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There are various factors that seem to have worked in the favour of the Mahayuti. The same factors worked against the Mahavikas Aghadi. Undeniably, the Mukhya Mantri Ladki Bahin Yojana, which was launched in July, soon after the great debacle of the Mahayuti in the parliamentary elections, has borne fruits. The scheme that offered a monthly sum of Rs 1,500 to eligible women between the age group of 21 and 65 years of age, gave rise to a new constituency of voters in support of the Mahayuti.
The scheme managed to reach 2.34 crore women who received Rs 7,500 each over five months. Shinde, today, addressing a press conference, said that “reaching over 4.60 crore women voters helped the Mahayuti regain power.” The state, so far, has transferred Rs 17,000 crore directly to women beneficiaries. And on coming to power, the monthly amount will to be increased to Rs 2,100 a month.
Seeing an over 5% rise in the total voting in the state, Fadnavis had attributed it to women voters, who had apparently come out in the party’s favour. The voting pattern will become clearer in the coming days, with election data making a close study of the gender and caste demographics possible.
In retrospect, the Mahavikas Aghadi’s decision to oppose the scheme and later, to pitch a similar scheme as a part of their manifesto, has not resonated with the voters.
Maharashtra has been facing several challenges, from unemployment to farmers’ distress. Voters across constituencies have been openly airing their woes. The palpable unhappiness among the youths of the Maratha community, who have been demanding reservation in employment and education, coupled with the agrarian crisis, had indicated anti-Mahayuti sentiments in most parts of the state. However, the results today have almost defied the ground reality, with the BJP making a sizeable gain in the Marathwada region.
Besides the parliamentary election, in the past five years, the state has not had a single election, be it on the zilla parishad or the corporation level. In the absence of local representatives, issues of better roads, water and transport had also become major talking points, especially in the urban areas. The voters, however, seem to have overlooked these issues while casting their ballots, considering the sweeping victory that the BJP and other allies have managed even in the urban regions of the state.
