As the dust settles after two weeks of hectic campaigning for local self-government body polls in rural Maharashtra this week, and the polling takes place for the city councils or nagar parishad polls all over the state, a clear trend has emerged where the ruling BJP is seen ensuring that prominent faces from other parties, including their own alliance partners, cross over to them, thereby increasing the winnability factor for the BJP in hundreds of seats that were otherwise looking difficult to win. This has clearly put not just the opposition but also alliance partners of the BJP, such as Eknath Shinde, in doubt about how they will politically survive once the poll season is over.
The BJP looked very aggressive as it prepared to face elections in hundreds of nagar parishads all over Maharashtra. Especially in the Konkan and Western Maharashtra, which have traditionally been the Shiv Sena and NCP strongholds, the BJP was seen going out of its way to ensure many faces from both these parties simply crossed over to their party, leaving both Eknath Shinde and the NCP leaders stunned. Shiv Sena leader Nilesh Rane got very vocal about all this, and in his Sindhudurg district of Konkan region, he came out on the streets to tell the people about what the BJP was doing to his party. Similar views were expressed by leaders like Naresh Mhaske of Eknath Shinde's party in the Thane district, where some of Shinde's trusted men simply crossed over to the BJP overnight and campaigned for the Lotus symbol!
Shinde rushed to New Delhi and, reportedly, complained about all this to Union Home Minister Amit Shah. The main grievance was about BJP Maharashtra State President Ravindra Chavan, who was aggressively expanding the BJP's base in Konkan, right from the Raigad district and Thane district up to the Sindhudurg district in the south. This has now made the local self-government polls look like a contest between the BJP and Eknath Shinde, with the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA of Congress, Sharad Pawar and Uddhav Thackery) just not seen anywhere in the picture!
To add to this, some of the MLAs of Eknath Shinde's original core team, such as Shahaji Patil and Sanjay Shirsat, faced raids by the state government agencies ahead of the polling day to check whether any violation of the model code of conduct of the Election Commission was done by either of them in terms of possession of large amounts of cash or any other such thing. This enraged the MLAs, as they openly came out in public to target the BJP. After this, Ravindra Chavan was heard saying that the Mahayuti alliance had to be preserved only till the voting got over for the nagar parishad polls on Tuesday, December 2!
All this has now raised questions in Maharashtra about what Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde's next move will be. It is obvious that almost two dozen of his 41 MLAs, who are mainly from rural Maharashtra, have been politically cornered by the BJP. The BJP either poached these activists or put them in such a tight spot that they could not properly campaign for the local self-government polls. The big question is whether this will affect the BJP in the upcoming Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) polls. The top leadership of the BJP has already given indications that in Mumbai they want the Mahayuti alliance to get into a seat-sharing alliance, and in other municipal corporations, such as Thane and Pune, they would have "friendly fights" with the alliance partners and will not go for a pre-poll alliance.
Insiders say that the think tank of the BJP in Maharashtra now feels that it is time Eknath Shinde is forced to take the back seat in the Mahayuti alliance, and the BJP will be seen taking steps to ensure that happens slowly but surely. They feel that in the Hindutva space, they should have another partner in the alliance, as with the 57 seats that Shinde has in the state assembly, he is often seen getting very aggressive politically, which the BJP does not appreciate.
While on the one hand, all parties are seen getting united against the state election commission ahead of the local self-government polls because of various issues of mismanagement in the polling process, on the other hand, there is immense poaching happening by the ruling party of leaders from its own alliance partners, leading to questions about how the opposition parties will face this big challenge.
Rohit Chandavarkar is a senior journalist who has worked for 31 years with various leading newspaper brands and television channels in Mumbai and Pune.
