Modi, Eknath Shinde, Amit Shah & RSS: Haryana template to power BJP’s Maharashtra poll plan
After days of hard negotiations on all sides, the Maharashtra election chess board was finally laid out on Wednesday with the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) announcing a seat-sharing deal.
MVA partners Shiv Sena (Uddhav), Congress and NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar) will contest 85 seats each in the 288-member Maharashtra Assembly with 18 segments still undecided. The agreement was announced by all allies hours after the ruling Shiv Sena declared its first list of 45 candidates, fielding Chief Minister Eknath Shinde from Kopri Panchpakhadi seat in Thane.
Shiv Sena (UBT) followed suit by announcing its maiden list of 65 candidates, including Kedar Dighe opposite Eknath Shinde, and party chief Uddhav Thackeray’s son Aditya from Worli. Aditya’s current seat is central Mumbai.
The ruling Mahayuti (Shiv Sena, BJP and NCP) had reached a seat-sharing agreement last week, though a formal announcement is yet to be made. As reported first by The Tribune, the BJP is expected to contest somewhere around 150 to 160 seats, Shiv Sena 80 to 90 and the rest to go to the NCP.
So far as strategy goes, the BJP plans to follow the Haryana poll victory template in the western state. This involves Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s broad political direction on strategy for ticket selection, Home Minister Amit Shah’s day-to-day monitoring of poll planning (he steered seat-sharing talks); state-level micro-management of booths by Modi’s trusted lieutenants—BJP in charge for state polls Bhupender Yadav (Environment Minister) and co-in charge Ashwini Vaishnaw (Information and Broadcasting Minister) and the RSS’ mass mobilisation through the campaign cycle culminating on aggressive voter mobilisation efforts on voting day, November 20. The RSS plans 80,000 local meetings across Maharashtra.
The BJP started early on Maharashtra planning with Modi taking the critical call that the alliance will go into elections with CM Eknath Shinde as the face. “The decision to retain Shinde, an important community leader, is significant and is along similar lines as retaining CM Nayab Singh Saini as the party’s face in Haryana during and after the polls,” said a BJP source.
Asked if Shinde would be retained should the alliance win like Saini was in Haryana, this source said, “There would be no reason to replace him.”
In Haryana, BJP sources said, the following factors worked—PM’s decision of dropping 38 per cent MLAs and retaining Saini as the face; Shah’s active planning, cohesion between key strategists and poll in-charges and active ground campaigning. In Maharashtra, the BJP has retained 80 sitting MLAs in the first list of 99 candidates and is playing safe.
The BJP also believes that as in Haryana (where the party was down five seats in the Lok Sabha polls compared to 10 in 2019), it would fare much better in Maharashtra vis-a-vis national elections.
“Whatever anti-incumbency there was in Haryana, it was dissipated in the Lok Sabha poll where we lost five of the 10 seats we had. Yet, we had a lead on 44 Assembly seats of the 90, so we were in the fight from day one and just needed to expand that lead. In Maharashtra too, whatever anger voters had against the Mahayuti was vented in the Lok Sabha polls where we lost many seats. So, anti-incumbency would not be as huge an issue as many would like to perceive. In Haryana also, pollsters over-read the anti-incumbency issue, not realising that people had their chance of punishing the incumbent during the LS polls,” BJP sources said.
Saffron strategy
- BJP believes Maha polls will follow Haryana pattern where voters dissipated their anger against incumbent govt in LS poll
- Anti-incumbency did not weigh in state elections
- RSS plans 80,000 meetings; Shah steers seat-sharing talks
