The saga of rival factions making claims on the ‘real’ Nationalist Congress Party is still in flux. Even if the Ajit Pawar group has become a part of the state government in Maharashtra, it looks like there is more to come within the party and the governing alliance.
But the recent power politics moves in the state can also be decoded for their political messaging in national politics. They have a mix of opportunities and challenges for both the proposed opposition alliance and the BJP-led alliance at the centre.
For the BJP, the immediate gain of allying with Ajit Pawar’s breakaway faction is easing its dependence on the Shiv Sena led by chief minister Eknath Shinde. With an assembly poll scheduled for next year, the new swell in numbers secures the majority of the state government, even though it may make the CM and his party more careful about their allies in the government. Given the fragility of alliances in the last four years in the state, Shinde may feel his allies, especially Ajit Pawar, are breathing down his neck.
In the next few months, however, what the BJP will be eyeing is the state’s 48 Lok Sabha seats. Before the Shiv Sena split, it had been part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance which won 41 of these seats in the 2019 poll. It’s a tally the party is trying to retain, if not improve, with a new ally in its fold. But repeating those numbers will not be easy, especially with the altered political scene in Maharashtra. The NDA will hope that Pawar Junior’s breakaway faction will help hold onto the last Lok Sabha poll performance.
Even if these gains could be state-specific, the split in the NCP can be useful to the BJP in its larger messaging against the proposed opposition alliance – the fragility of that formation and its instability. The BJP has taken into account the fact that the recent opposition meet in Patna mostly had anti-BJPism to offer as the common ideological plank, similar to the anti-Congress sentiment in the 1960s and ’70s. The NCP was one of the 15 parties that had attended the Patna meet, and the BJP would like to show that the opposition’s convergence has many seeds of divergence.
The central government will also juxtapose the instability of the Maharashtra episode with its own stable, two-term governance, made possible by winning a clear majority. The NCP split, even if it had BJP as a constituent of the new alliance, could be pitched as one of the perils of coalition politics. In the last few months, the BJP’s top leadership has been attacking opportunistic attempts to cobble an opposition front. At the same time, the party’s long campaign for next year’s general election reckons that the electorate needs to be reminded of the chaotic mess that such alliances bring to politics and governance.
India had a coalition era stemming two and a half decades, beginning from the early 1990s. Between 1984 and 2014, every government at the centre reflected the pulls and pressures of coalition politics, and the expedient calculations that went into making and unmaking alliances. The last two terms of the NDA government have been coalition in structure but stable in functioning because its pivot, the BJP, has been in a dominant position of securing an electoral majority on its own. The party would like to pitch that a large opposition alliance of disparate interests could bring instability back at the centre.
In some ways, the BJP will also hope that the war of succession within the Pawar family is seen by the electorate as mirroring the ugly side of dynastic politics – something the top brass has constantly berated. With a member of the family now in the NDA fold, the BJP can now only target patriarch Sharad Pawar, not the Pawar family. These messages – about divergence and disarray in the opposition alliance, and about undemocratic dynastic politics – will be subtexts to the larger narrative the party will weave in the long campaign ahead.
In the wake of the Maharashtra episode, the opposition can take solace from the fact that messaging about the opposition’s lack of cohesion hasn’t always worked for incumbent strong governments at the centre. In the 1989 Lok Sabha poll, then Congress prime minister Rajiv Gandhi had cautioned voters against the risk of instability and the lack of cohesion in the National Front, an opposition alliance. That didn’t stop the National Front from winning enough seats to form the government at the centre under the leadership of Vishwanath Pratap Singh. More than a decade before, the same could be said about the Janata Party government of 1977.
Though both these governments did not last long, the 1990s and the first decade of the current century had a succession of coalition governments. Three out of four of them completed their terms. In doing so, they made the practice of stitching pre-poll and post-poll alliances a common feature of national politics, with either of the two national parties – Congress or BJP – placed as the pivots of such formations.
Given these possibilities, the fact that the Congress leadership chose to back Sharad Pawar’s faction signals continuity in the alliance-making exercise. The Congress leadership may also pitch it as the alliance fighting the BJP’s efforts to disintegrate the opposition, an allegation it’s been making for the past few years.
In the long run-up to 2024, the Machiavellian unfolding of alliance politics in Maharashtra will be seen for its spillover effect beyond state politics. The latest realignment brings different materials to be used as political messaging by both the BJP at the centre and the proposed opposition alliance. Its role in the national electoral battle will be seen next summer, while its meaning in state politics will be assessed in the later part of next year.
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