The swearing-in of rebel Shiv Sena leader Eknath Shinde as Chief Minister and BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis as Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra is something totally out of the blue. The report was that Fadnavis would become chief minister and Shinde would be the deputy chief minister. This made sense because the BJP has three times the number of MLAs the rebel Shiv Sena has. Age-wise, Fadnavis may be junior to Shinde but politically, the former is senior to him. He served one full term as chief minister with Shinde as his Cabinet colleague. That is why nobody could have expected Fadnavis to join Shinde’s cabinet as his deputy. In fact, Fadnavis had announced that he would support the Shinde government from the outside. That also did not make sense. It was puerile to expect Shinde to provide a stable government when he had less than 20 per cent of the MLAs supporting him. His government would have become a laughing stock. It was against this backdrop that the Central leadership of the BJP intervened, forcing the sulking Fadnavis to agree to join Shinde’s cabinet.
Union Home Minister Amit Shah had to issue a statement describing the situation in which Fadnavis agreed to the BJP chief JP Nadda’s request to join the government. It shows the extraordinary situation in which something unusual has happened in Maharashtra. Of course, the BJP will use the development to argue that what happened in the state was not due to its machinations. Opposition parties have been claiming with some measure of credibility that the BJP was the source of strength for Eknath Shinde when he took a majority of the Shiv Sena MLAs, first to Surat, then to Guwahati and finally to Goa, in a bid to expose Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray’s lack of support in the Shiv Sena. It has already claimed that the party did not want to hold the post of chief minister and it merely responded to the fast-paced political development in the state. The Shiv Sena had all along been claiming that the BJP never wanted to share the post of CM with it. Two and a half years ago when the elections threw up a hung House, the Shiv Sena wanted the chief ministership for the first two and a half years. The BJP was not prepared for it. It was under such circumstances that the Shiv Sena entered into a deal with the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress to form what was called the Maha Vikas Aghadi. Now, by accepting a secondary role in the new dispensation, the BJP wants to prove that chief ministership is not that important for the party. Of course, it is not the sagacity of either Fadnavis or the BJP which is on display. Whether one likes it or not, the BJP is far more disciplined than any other party. Fadnavis had a meteoric rise in the BJP. He became, first, Mayor of Nagpur and then chief minister at a very young age. He has so many factors playing to his advantage. He knows that as leader of the 106-member BJP legislature party he will have greater say in the government than even the chief minister who at the end of the day is the leader of only a faction of the Shiv Sena. Between the two, Fadnavis has greater charisma and has the support of the Central leadership of the BJP. He will be seen as the real power behind the Shiv Sena throne.
Compared to Fadnavis, Shinde has to prove a lot. That he is politically quite savvy is not in doubt. He has succeeded in manoeuvring the BJP into agreeing to let him become the chief minister. It is the fulfilment of his ambition. True, he has proved that he has a larger number of MLAs to support him than Uddhav Thackeray. Now he has to prove that the party is solidly behind him. Ideologically, Fadnavis and Shinde have a lot in common. Of course, the question would remain as to what prevented Shinde’s group from merging in the BJP. Nobody would have found anything amiss in such a decision. In the case of Thackeray, ideology was indeed an issue. Even his last-minute decision to rename Aurangabad and Osmanabad was taken unilaterally and not with the support of the Congress and the NCP. The BJP has, rightly or wrongly, acquired the reputation of being a banyan tree that does not allow smaller parties to grow under its shade. There is no reason why it should allow Shinde to emerge as the tallest leader of the Shiv Sena when the BJP has ambitions of emerging as the dominant party in the whole state, including Mumbai. The whole country will be watching how Shinde and Fadnavis will make their next moves.
