THE installation of the Devendra Fadnavis Government in Maharashtra is a gamechanging moment for the BJP under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The party’s remarkable performance in the elections – it won 132 of the 288 seats in the state Assembly on its own – allows it to dictate terms to one and all. While its allies are beholden to it, the party’s rivals have been driven to the status of political non-entities.
This signifies the reversal of the trend against the BJP and its allies in 2024 Lok Sabha elections. It also underscores the party’s dominance in a state where regional outfits, like the Shiv Sena and the NCP, have been playing the role of kingmaker for decades.
A tighter grip over Maharashtra, with its political and economic clout, opens up the BJP’s prospects in other states where regional parties still call the shots. It also underscores the rising appeal of the Modi model of development in India and abroad. This change in the power-pecking order in, what was once a Congress bastion, has been coming for a while. In 2014, the BJP and the Shiv Sena contested the Assembly polls separately for the first time since forging an alliance in 1988.
Riding on the Modi wave, the BJP won 122 seats and the Sena 63, a clear sign of which party was now the primary driver of the Hindutva politics in the state.
When the Shiv Sena chose to go with the Congress-NCP alliance after the 2019 elections, the BJP became the sole representative of the saffron alliance. By breaking the Shiv Sena in 2022, and the NCP later, it reduced them to irrelevance.
Now, with its unprecedented three-fourths victory and a near 90 per cent strike rate, the BJP has created a potentially monopolistic situation for itself in Maharashtra. Similar is the situation in some other states also. In Assam, the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) is now very much the junior partner in the BJP-led Government. In Goa, the once dominant Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) is a minor appendage to the BJP. In Karnataka, the JD(S) is the subordinate member of the alliance.
Even in Bihar, where Nitish Kumar is Chief Minister, the BJP is only biding its time before it calls the shots. The other allies that remain within the NDA fold – be it Chirag Paswan’s Lok Janshakti or Chandrababu Naidu’s Telugu Desam –are out of compulsion, not any ideological conviction. Today, the Congress has been bested by the BJP in as many as 62 of the 75 direct contests and lost the momentum. By contrast, the BJP can now use the next five years to establish its supremacy over the state’s politics.
Maharashtra may not be a Hindutva laboratory like Gujarat just yet, but a new order has been put in place.
