There has been a lot of discussion among the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) partners in Maharashtra over how to share the seats in Assembly polls. All partners of the MVA doing well in the recent Lok Sabha polls not just gave them the confidence about the upcoming polls but they also realised that fighting as one unit has given them better polls results than what they ever imagined. Last few weeks they were seen puting forward claims about fighting most seats but suddenly on Tuesday the announcement came about the broader understanding that MVA partners will divide the 288 seats of the Assembly more or less equally between them.
Sharad Pawar and Uddhav Thackeray initiated the talks and the Congress party came along to decide that the seat share would be around 33% each between the three partners. Most observers believe that now the BJP may go for a complete rejig of their candidate selection policy in view of these developments. The BJP has gone into a deep dive, introspecting about what went wrong in Maharashtra during the recent Lok Sabha polls and why the party came down from 23 seats that they won in 2019 polls to nine in the recent polls. The party leadership in the state and in New Delhi unanimously feels that the campaign run by the Opposition claiming the BJP wants to make changes in the nation's constitution, worked with the SC, ST and minority community in the state and all those votes went in favour of the Congress and Shiv Sena (UBT). This is substantiated by the fact that the two smaller political parties which claimed to represent the interests of the SC,ST and minorities did very poorly in the Lok Sabha polls. Their entire voter base moved towards the MVA. The BJP now feels that the main exercise they should take up is to win back the confidence of these communities.
The biggest lesson of the Lok Sabha polls for all the political parties is that division of the anti-BJP votes which happened in Maharashtra in 2014 as well as 2019 Lok Sabha polls has not happened in 2024 polls. In the past elections the SC and ST votes went to smaller parties who claimed to be representing the interest of those communities while the Muslim community votes went to parties like the MIM in many constituencies. This resulted in the anti-BJP votes going in multiple directions and getting divided. In 2014 the SC, ST and Muslim votes consolidated in favour of the Congress and Shiv Sena (UBT) in Mumbai South and Mumbai North East constituencies this became very evident. In other constituencies too similar trend was seen. The BJP feels that this trend was driven by the campaign by the opposition that the BJP wants to get an excess majority in the Lok Sabha so that they can make changes in the constitution, especially certain provisions regarding reservation in education and jobs provided in the constitution.
BJP has to fight this issue on a war footing as the Assembly election in the state is only three months away in Maharashtra. The party took a lot of effort to gain power in the state in 2022. Now the party high command and the state leadership in Maharashtra are getting into frequent brainstorming sessions to decide the strategy in the state. One of the things the leadership is considering is to field more candidates from the SC, ST and Muslim communities. So instead of depending on smaller parties to take away the SC, ST and minority community votes from the Congress and other opposition, the BJP may decide to field more SC, ST and Muslim candidates themselves in the state Assembly polls.
The MVA has almost finalised their seat-sharing formula and have a three-way equal division of 33% each. The MVA members Congress, NCP Sharad Pawar group and Shiv Sena (UBT) may decide to field around 95 candidates each and leave the rest of the seats for some smaller alliance partners who will align with the MVA. The understanding was reached after Sharad Pawar and Uddhav Thackeray had multiple phone calls and they also spoke with the Congress party's central leadership. This makes the upcoming fight between the NDA and MVA in the Assembly polls very interesting.
Rohit Chandavarkar is a senior journalist who has worked for 31 years with various leading newspaper brands and television channels in Mumbai and Pune
