BJP unlikely to cede ground to Thackerays

Radhika Ramaseshan
Senior Journalist

TEN days after the verdict from Haryana and Maharashtra, the two states present a contrasting picture. Haryana yielded a hung Assembly, while in Maharashtra, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its long-term ally, the Shiv Sena, that fought the polls in alliance, comfortably crossed the half-way mark. Yet, after emerging as the single-largest party and falling short of the half-way mark of 45 in the 90-member legislature by five seats, the BJP lost no time in warming up to the Jannayak Janata Party (JJP) that was way behind it,  with 10 seats. It acceded to JJP chief Dushyant Chautala’s demand to anoint him as the Deputy Chief Minister. Although the Haryana Cabinet has not yet been constituted, the indications are that the animated and focused Chautala might punch above the JJP’s weight and seek representation on a par with the BJP.

Switch to Maharashtra. The BJP is the single-largest party, falling short of its projected ‘Mission 150’ slogan by 45 seats, while the Sena, that persistently claimed that under debutant Aaditya Thackeray — the first in the Thackeray family to contest an election — it would cross 100 seats, was left with 56. It clearly over-valued Aaditya’s stewardship. The Sena’s strike rate was far below the BJP’s; the BJP fought on 150 seats that it was allotted while the Sena was apportioned 124 of the 288 seats. 

Yet, the Sena made bold to exact the chief minister’s post from the BJP, contending that a 50:50 formula, that was mutually arrived at between the partners in an era when the BJP was content being subservient to the late Bal Thackeray, must hold even in today’s changed circumstances. The BJP made it clear that the CM would be its incumbent Devendra Fadnavis or nobody. 

If one were to cut through the acrimonious exchanges between the allies and deconstruct the picture, there’s a sense of déjà vu. The BJP’s relationship with the Sena dates back to 1990 when the duo fought the Maharashtra elections together and became a strong Opposition to the Congress on the back of political Hindutva and the promise to sanitise the system of turpitude. It was never a happy alliance although the BJP staved off the periodic crises that pockmarked their onward journey by agreeing to let Thackeray have the lion’s share of seats in the state while allowing a greater portion for itself in the Lok Sabha polls. Thackeray was sufficiently pragmatic to reckon that the Sena would not be able to leave an imprint beyond Maharashtra for the time to come and, therefore, it made sense to consolidate and expand his home turf. 

In 2001, when Maharashtra was ruled by the BJP-Sena coalition, Thackeray got restive. He was not satisfied with the ‘doles’ offered by the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the shape of the power and heavy industry ministries for his MPs, after reigning over the country’s richest state as an overlord from his home, ‘Matoshree’, at Mumbai’s Bandra. In his days of glory, Thackeray ordered the mighty Enron power major to leave his state and return on his terms.  Therefore, he felt slighted when the BJP would not play ball with his game-plan of dislodging the Congress chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh with the help of Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and setting up a non-Congress dispensation. The BJP, snubbed and over-ruled several times by Thackeray for the five years that they had a government from 1995 to 1999, revelled in his predicament. Vajpayee and LK Advani were canny enough to realise that retrieving a BJP-Sena government would be on Thackeray’s conditions and not theirs, which meant installing a Sena CM and adhering to Thackeray’s agenda that the Delhi bosses regarded as “destructive”.  At that point, the BJP seriously considered the NCP leader Sharad Pawar as a potential ally because the Maratha base Pawar had nurtured was something the BJP had not dreamt of putting its toe on, then.

There was a glitch. That was the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, one of the world’s richest civic bodies, that the BJP and Sena together controlled. Jettisoning the alliance could mean forsaking the BMC and losing a source of valuable revenue. 

Pramod Mahajan, Vajpayee’s close political aide and the BJP’s key strategist until 2004, was also the bridge between his party and Thackeray. At the sign of trouble, Mahajan would rush to ‘Matoshree’ and often mollify Thackeray, using Thackeray’s wife, Meena Tai, as a pacifier. Mahajan’s untimely death marked the start of an estrangement between the allies.

The tipping point came in 2014 when the partnership came apart before the assembly polls. Riding on the crest of the Modi wave, Amit Shah, the BJP president, reasoned out with the regional leaders that this was an opportune time for the party to rid itself of subservience to the Sena and leave its footprints all over Maharashtra. Shah realised his ambitions up to a point but the BJP fell short of a majority and turned to the Sena for support. By then, Thackeray senior had passed on the mantle to his son, Uddhav, who negotiated long and hard with the BJP and eventually agreed to set up a coalition.    

By 2019, the BJP returned to align with the Sena in the Lok Sabha polls. It had learnt its lessons from the 2014 assembly polls, where, despite the affecting bravado for beating the Sena, it realised that it had evened out and that its strategy to mesh the upper castes and the more backward castes and create a winning constituency was not tenable. The MBCs remain largely with the Sena.

The only captive base that the on-off partners share is urban Maharashtra where communal polarisation —  a legacy of the Ram temple ‘movement’, the 1993 communal violence and the bomb blasts — endures as a political instrument. 

However, while the BJP has grown exponentially in an earlier phase and incrementally in a subsequent period, under Uddhav, the Sena stagnated. Bereft of his father’s charisma, the low-key leader’s only success has been to keep the party intact even after his cousin, Raj Thackeray left and floated the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) that never made an impact. 

After helming a coalition for the first time since 2014, the BJP tasted blood. More importantly, Fadnavis’ ambitions have soared despite the BJP suffering losses in Vidarbha, his stamping ground. 

What the Thackerays have forgotten is that the Modi-Shah era represents a qualitative departure from the past where despite their reservations about the Sena and its stormtroopers, Vajpayee and Advani eventually relented after a confrontation. Modi and Shah will meet the Sena, eyeball-to-eyeball, and are unlikely to blink.