The unexpected results seen in the Haryana Assembly polls have surprised politicians and political observers all over the country. Most exit polls broadcast by national news channels a couple of days ago predicted that the Congress party would win and form the government in the state. Now it seems that the Bharatiya Janata Party has an edge and will continue to rule the state for a third term. This means that after Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, the BJP has found a third state in India which has defied anti-incumbency and chosen the same party to form the government. The big question now being asked is, how the political parties in Maharashtra, especially the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) of which the Congress is a part, will be affected by this development?
Ever since the Lok Sabha poll results came out in the first week of June, the Congress in Maharashtra has looked and felt very confident. The party started getting aggressive not just with the ruling government but also with its alliance partners in the field. The body language of the leaders of the Congress started looking different in the past four months. In Maharashtra both the political alliances, the MVA and the BJP-led Mahayuti, are currently going through the process of deciding the seat-sharing formula for the upcoming Assembly polls. The Congress was beginning to take an aggressive posture in these talks with its partners Shiv Sena (UBT) and NCP (SCP) in the talks. The leaders were looking as if they had almost taken it for granted that they would be winning the upcoming Assembly polls. Now suddenly with Haryana results out and the Congress getting a setback there, all this is expected to change.
Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT) has been constantly demanding that the MVA should announce the face of the probable chief minister from the MVA alliance in advance. Barring the 2019 Assembly election (where the BJP announced that Devendra Fadnavis would be their CM candidate if they returned to power), Maharashtra has never seen a tradition of any party or alliance announcing their “CM candidate” in advance but the Shiv Sena (UBT) has insisted that this should be done. The Congress has opposed this idea as they feel that once a face is announced by a particular party in advance it discourages activists of other parties from the alliance from participating in the election campaign aggressively. Now looking at the fact that the Congress party has not been able to win the Haryana polls decisively, Shiv Sena (UBT) has once again started pushing for the demand of announcing the CM candidate from Tuesday evening.
The Haryana results are also likely to put the Congress on the defensive over seat-sharing talks with the Shiv Sena (UBT) especially in Mumbai and Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR). It is now well known that seat-sharing in Mumbai city and suburbs has not been easy between the Congress and Uddhav Thackeray’s party. Congress feels that it was dominating Mumbai and ruled the BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) before the 1980s when Shiv Sena took over the reins in the BMC. In fact the Congress and Shiv Sena have been bitter rivals for decades in Mumbai. Now with Congress losing Haryana both parties may be looking at the seat-sharing deal for Mumbai from a different perspective.
Some Congress party insiders, speaking with The FPJ, said that the party’s strategies may have gone wrong in many ways in Haryana. The way some leaders were given too much prominence, the way seats were distributed to candidates from a particular lobby, the way two prominent leaders of the party from Haryana were not given a big enough role; all these factors went against the party according to them. The question is whether these mistakes will be avoided in Maharashtra. Some from the Congress party feel that in Maharashtra the party has to strike the right seat-sharing deal with Uddhav Thackeray in Mumbai and Konkan and with Sharad Pawar in Western Maharashtra. These two regions themselves account for more than 100 seats out of the 288 seats of the Maharashtra Assembly.
Some observers say the problem with the Congress party is that it has very good leaders at the top and a committed voter base, but it now lacks a widespread party cadre. The grassroots Congress worker has somehow moved away from the party and either joined some other party such as Sharad Pawar’s NCP, or has left politics. The challenge for the top leadership of the Congress at the Centre and in the state is to revive that grassroot campaigning activity and commitment among the activists which has been on the decline for the past few years. Whether that will happen effectively is not known but one thing is obvious that the Haryana trends and results have been a wakeup call for the Congress party in Maharashtra.
Rohit Chandavarkar is a senior journalist who has worked for 31 years with various leading newspaper brands and television channels in Mumbai and Pune
