Assembly poll Verdict: Modi ‘magic’ bolsters BJP hold with landslide win

At the BJP headquarters on Saturday, a familiar buzzword echoed. “This is Modi magic,” said every leader, as the party basked in the glory of mega Maharashtra win.

The unprecedented saffron landslide in the western state left the party leaders overwhelmed. It was a rerun of Haryana where the party, to its surprise, struck a comfortable hat-trick despite a two-term anti-incumbency.

Maharashtra is the fifth state to consecutively vote the BJP thrice after Goa, Gujarat, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh, cementing PM Narendra Modi’s pro-incumbency narrative and his oft stated line that the “BJP is a pan India party of everyone’s choice and a party dedicated to development and good governance”.

A quick analysis of Maharashtra results revealed that the BJP won support across segments — OBC, Maratha, Dalit, ST, women, youth and farmers and all of Maharashtra’s six regions, including battleground segments of Mumbai, Marathwada and Vidarbha.

“The NDA won handsomely in seats dominated by the Marathas, OBCs, SCs and STs. We also received generous support from women who constitute 2 crore of the voters. The Ladki Yojana worked well as did several pro-farmer measures such as Rs 6,000 MSP on per quintal of soyabean and a hike in Kisan Samman Nidhi from Rs 12,000 to Rs 15,000,” a BJP leader.

With a strong community leader — CM Eknath Shinde — at the helm, micro-management and voter mobilisation strategies in place, full RSS support and a mix of development, welfare and polarising slogans such as “ek hain to safe hain”, “batenge to katenge”, the NDA swept Maharashtra.

Votes between the Mahayuti alliance partners transferred seamlessly and the withdrawal of Maratha quota activist Manoj Jarange Patil from the poll fray at the last minute helped the ruling coalition big time.

Behind the strategies, like always, was Modi’s trusted lieutenant and Home Minister Amit Shah who worked in his shadows. While the Maharashtra tsunami consolidates BJP’s position in the national politics and decimates the Congress, it also sends a clear signal of Modi’s pre-eminence that had taken a hit of sorts after the party failed to win a simple majority in the Lok Sabha elections earlier this year.

At that time, the RSS had flagged to the BJP the urgent need for a course correction and regrouping based on joint, rather than unilateral strategies. The saffron family buried the hatchet and the result was a Haryana hat-trick and now a win in Maharashtra, where the BJP shattered its own records of 2014 and 2019. Also, it was the biggest for any pre-poll coalition in Maharashtra since 1972.

That explains why it firmly establishes Modi’s indispensability to the saffron scheme of things and effectively buries all murmurs that he should retire after turning 75 next year.

The NDA today added 5 per cent votes, clocking 48.38 per cent vote share in Maharashtra as against 43.55 per cent in the Lok Sabha elections.

The Congress, Shiv Sena-UBT and the NCP-SP’s Maha Vikas Aghadi, on the other hand, lost 10 per cent votes and were down to 33.31 per cent as against 43.55 per cent in the Lok Sabha elections. In Jharkhand, which the JMM-led INDIA coalition returned to power, but the BJP’s vote share was the highest — 33.18 per cent as against JMM’s 23.44 per cent.