Who would have imagined that Narendra Modi and Amit Shah would find great virtues in Ajit Pawar, Sharad Pawar’s mercurial nephew and a perpetual chief-minister-in-waiting? “You are at the right place now,” Shah, the Union home minister, remarked in Pune last week while sharing the dais with a smiling Ajit Pawar at an event. “But it took you long [to come here].”
Two months ago, the prime minister, Modi, had listed out details of the Nationalist Congress Party’s financial scams at a political rally in Bhopal. Today, Ajit Pawar sits with the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Maharashtra as a deputy chief minister. Maharashtra’s politics underwent a metamorphosis for the second time recently, reminiscent of the events from a year ago when the BJP first engineered a split in the Shiv Sena, toppling the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi government by luring away Eknath Shinde and 40 other members of the legislative assembly.
Why did the BJP engineer a coup in the NCP when its government in Maharashtra was sitting pretty? And why did Ajit Pawar raise a rebellion when the public mood is changing? The Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress alliance looked formidable a year ago. Internal surveys by the BJP showed that it would sweep the state that sends 48 members to the Lok Sabha. So, the BJP had to do something. They got Shinde on their side. Even if it looked ugly and morally corrupt.
But this expensive gamble boomeranged, as some recent surveys indicated. In the meantime, Ajit Pawar — the strong Maratha leader waiting endlessly to emerge from the shadows of his uncle — seemed willing to cross over with his colleagues to end his perpetual wait to emerge as a leader in his own right. Modi and Shah desperately need a repeat of 2019 when they had won 41 seats in alliance with the Shiv Sena out of Maharashtra’s 48 seats. With anti-incumbency setting in, this sweep looked difficult unless the BJP bulldozed the Opposition.
Maharashtra’s ruling dispensation has nearly 200 MLAs at present, 105 from the BJP, 40 from the Shinde-led Sena, 40-odd along with Ajit Pawar, and a dozen independents. The Congress is the biggest Opposition block, with the depleted factions of the NCP and Shiv Sena. On paper, the BJP-led alliance looks strong.
And yet, no one seems happy. Ajit Pawar’s entry has turned Shinde wary. Fadnavis, the former chief minister, has been relegated to taking instructions from New Delhi. And Ajit Pawar is an unsettled outsider who must keep one eye on Shinde’s and Fadnavis’ moves and the other on his uncle, Sharad Pawar, since the wily patriarch has instructed his remaining soldiers to ready his canons for one last hurrah in the electoral battle: the octogenarian isn’t giving in or up.
While winning over Ajit Pawar, the BJP leadership had hoped that Pawar Senior would join the ranks. But with Pawar Senior sounding a bugle for a fight, the NCP MLAs are worried and avoiding taking sides openly. It’s not easy to defy Sharad Pawar in Maharashtra, they know this.
It must be asked, what did the BJP gain from this game with all its machinations? It installed its own government, but with the outsiders, Shinde and Ajit Pawar, at the wheels. It’s a question bothering the BJP’s rank and file, who must obey Modi’s orders and carry the cross as asked. For 30 years, the BJP workers — largely from other backward classes — fought against Pawar and company and, now, suddenly he is given a red carpet and told that they must rally behind his chief ministerial ambitions. That unease might explode, the state BJP knows.
With 2024 approaching, Maharashtra might yet be a major test for the BJP, rather than the Opposition, to retain its mojo and, in the run-up to the elections, hold on to its own flock.
