JOIN USA Pawar-ful stand that stopped opposition rout in Maha
Seventy-eight-year-old Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) President, Sharad Pawar, addressing an election rally in Satara, in heavy rain, completely drenched, would go down as the defining image of the Maharashtra Assembly polls 2019.
The image symbolised that Pawar was carrying on a spirited if lonely Opposition fight back to take his party to a respectable figure on counting day.
As the results came in, his effort stood vindicated. Pawar’s party emerged as the principle opposition in the 288-strong assembly, while the parent party, the Congress, only marginally improved its 2014 worst-ever performance. The NCP seemed set to win at least 54 seats – 13 more than in 2014, while the Congress with its 44 (two more than in 2014) ended up fourth, behind the BJP (105) at number one and the Shiv Sena (56) second.
Despite a series of high-profile desertions, Modi-Shah’s campaigning and BJP-Sena party apparatus, the Pawar campaign uplifted the morale of the workers and inspired his rank and file.
And the fact that the BJP and Sena seat-tally dropped despite contesting together and the Congress-NCP’s inched close to a formidable hundred, despite a number of factors, was all due to Pawar’s one-man-show. This was otherwise a lackluster election lacking in public fervor or enthusiasm where the outcome – that the BJP and Shiv Sena would return to power – was said to be a no-brainer.
In a way, the Congress was punished more severely by the electorate because not only did it not play the role of the principle opposition in the last five years earnestly – its leader of Opposition Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil crossed over to the BJP six months ago to become a minister in the Devendra Fadnavis-cabinet – the grand old party did not put up any electoral contest or concerted campaign in a state it dominated not until so long ago. The Congress central leadership stayed away, the state leadership was stuck in personal fiefdoms, and it was nowhere close to recapturing public imagination.
Still the Congress-NCP front put up a much better performance than the exit polls suggested. Pawar refashioned his focus on his sugarcane citadel of western Maharashtra, Marathwada, parts of northern Maharashtra, by striking it big in the seats he fought there.
While the Congress just fell apart as a party, some of the party’s local stalwarts – former CM and party state president Ashok Chavan in Bhokar, current state president Balasaheb Thorat and leader of opposition Vijay Wadettiwari, held on to their seats.
The outcome suggests a few broad trends: The Congress and NCP faced a near-wipe-out in urban constituencies in Mumbai, Thane, the Konkan-belt, Pune, Nashik, Navi Mumbai and other major cities, which together constitute more than 50 per cent of the state assembly constituencies. It won most of the rural and semi-urban constituencies.
After its rout in 2014, the Congress had a chance to rebuild itself in Maharashtra, but failed – it now stares at oblivion in at least 17 districts of Maharashtra, mainly in Mumbai-Thane-Navi-Mumbai-Konkan belt.
The turn-coats – who switched over to the BJP and Sena from the Congress and NCP just ahead of elections – were a mixed bag; many of them lost by huge margins, the biggest upset being that of Shivaji’s descendant in Satara, Udayanraje Bhosale, an NCP MP who switched over to the BJP and sought a re-election from the Lok Sabha constituency on a saffron ticket. He lost the by poll by a huge margin to the NCP’s Shrinivas Patil, former MP and Sikkim Governor. Electorate taught many of them and particularly the BJP, a stinging lesson.
As Pawar said in his first reaction after the results: “People don’t seem to have liked arrogance.”
(Jaideep Hardikar is an independent journalist based out of Nagpur and Roving Reporter at the People’s Archive of Rural India)
The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.