Unlike in Haryana where the BJP-led NDA alliance was in a minority, the verdict in Maharashtra was quite unambiguous after the election results were declared on October 24. With 161 seats going to the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance in a 288-seat assembly, government should have been formed in Maharashtra long time back. Surprisingly, while in Haryana the BJP moved in swiftly to form a government in alliance with Dushyant Chautala’s Jannayak Janata Party, government formation in Maharashtra turned out to be an unexpected nightmare for the BJP which was comprehensively thwarted by an adamant Sena. Although the BJP eventually opted out of government formation on November 10, political realignment between the Sena, NCP and the Congress also failed to deliver a decisive outcome mainly because the governor set tight deadlines for the Sena and NCP to express their ability to form a stable government.
While Maharashtra has been placed under the President’s rule for now, hectic efforts are on to negotiate a deal for government formation based on a common minimum programme between the Sena, NCP and Congress. Whereas more twists and turns are not ruled out in the drama of political compulsion before a solution to the political impasse emerges, there is a possibility that within a fortnight Maharashtra may have a Sena-NCP-Congress government. But the question is: why did the BJP and Sena fail to form a government despite a decisive mandate to their alliance? One of the reasons is the piquant nature of 2019 verdict in which the confident BJP won fewer seats than expected and lost more seats than the Sena, thus making the former vulnerable to its oldest ally’s demands.
In terms of seats won by both parties, the 2019 verdict is not much dissimilar to 2014 assembly election when the Sena and BJP did not have a pre-poll alliance. In both elections, the Sena’s seat tally has been about half of the BJP’s: in 2014 the BJP had won 122 seats, while the Sena won 63; in 2019, the BJP has won 105 seats with a vote share of 25.75 per cent and the Sena has got 56 seats and 16.41 per cent votes. It’s not that the Sena did not try similar tactics to put pressure on BJP in 2014.
But with the NCP quickly promising “conditional support” to the BJP in 2014, the Sena had no choice but to join the BJP-led government without much hard bargain. However, this time there was no question of the NCP coming to the BJP’s rescue, given that the NCP fought a hard battle to win 54 seats and retain its electoral bastion despite defections of its several senior leaders. This gave the Sena a big window of opportunity to demand equal share in power. There is another reason why the Sena stuck to its demand and refused to blink. The Sena and BJP formed an alliance in 1990 and a look at the vote share and seat tally of both the parties in assembly elections over the last three decades gives a clear picture. The 1990 assembly election in Maharashtra is considered as a “watershed election” in the state’s politics because for the first time the two right-wing parties emerged as the main opposition parties, reducing the influence of smaller left-wing parties in the state. In the 1990 election, the Sena was a dominant party with 15.94 per cent vote share, against the BJP’s 10.71 per cent. Their respective seat tally was 52 seats for the Sena and 42 for the BJP. The Congress which came to power had won 141 seats with a vote share of 38.17 per cent.
In 1995, when the Congress lost power for the first time in Maharashtra to the Sena-BJP combine, the Sena won 73 seats (vote share 16.39 per cent), while the BJP won 65 seats with a vote shares of 12.80 per cent. In 1999, Sharad Pawar left the Congress and formed his own party called the Nationalist Congress Party. In the election that followed in October that year, the BJP-Sena alliance lost power to the Congress and NCP which contested separately but formed post poll alliance. While the Sena won 69 seats with a vote share of 17.33 per cent, the BJP won 56 seats but improved its vote share to 14.54 per cent. The Congress won 75 seats and NCP 58; their respective vote share was 27.2 percent and 17.33 per cent.
In the next two assembly elections in 2004 and 2009, the Congress-NCP alliance retained power. But things changed a lot for the BJP in 2014: the BJP and Sena contested independently but the Modi wave gave BJP 122 seats with a whopping vote share of 27.8 per cent, while the Sena won 63 seats and improved its vote share to 19.3 per cent mainly because of the 282 seats it contested. Needless to say, the Congress and the NCP performed badly but managed to keep their respective vote share intact. Thus between 1990 and 2019, the Sena’s vote share remained constant between 15 and 20 percent, while the BJP’s vote share increased from a low of around 10 percent to more than 25 per cent. As a result, since 2014, the Sena had been forced to play second fiddle to the BJP in the state, while the BJP played the senior partner in the government.
The decline of the Congress and the rise of coalition politics across the country, including Maharashtra, began in 1990. Since then, the BJP and regional parties like the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Janata Dal (United), Biju Janata Dal, Telugu Desam and Trinamool Congress have gained from the declining vote share of the Congress. But in Maharashtra, while the BJP spread its influence evenly across the state and made maximum electoral gains, the Sena has remained stagnant and confined mainly to its pockets of influence largely because it diluted its regional identity by embracing the larger Hindutva ideology. There was a fear within the Sena that continuing to play second fiddle to the BJP would erode its vote bank, with Sena voters switching to the ideologically similar and more powerful BJP.
Hence the Sena’s insistence on power sharing formula, which would have helped it come out of BJP’s shadow. But with the BJP refusing to concede to Sena’s demand, it now remains to be seen whether the demise of the long-standing alliance between the two ideologically compatible pro-Hindutva ,parties will see the Sena returning to its original pro-Marathi agenda. What also remains to be seen is how the Sena, NCP and Congress resolve their ideological differences if the trio form a government in Maharashtra.
The author is an independent senior journalist.
This article was published in the print edition of Free Press Journal on November 19, 2019 with the heading Why did Shiv Sena snap ties with its ideological ally BJP?
