Maharashtra polls: BJP's imported candidates will be a pain for the loyals

It is clear by now that in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s own estimation, the chances of it coming to power in Maharashtra are bright. That’s why, according to its reasoning, the break-up with the Shiv Sena was a step they had to take, but that’s not how they make it known. It was the stubborn Sena that drove them to the divorce, as they put it. That is only one part of the story. The other is that it is trying to insure access to power, not just sweeping to it on 19 October in Maharashtra, by two moves. One, is admitting as many as 40 outsiders to the party, even those it held guilty of political improprieties in the past, almost in the last hour to fielding them as candidates across the state’s 288 constituencies. These are locals with political muscle, thus with better chances of winning. [caption id=“attachment_1739577” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image. AFP[/caption] This at once exposes the BJP claim of the party having expanded and capable of winning enough seats without the prop of the long-time ally Shiv Sena. If it had expanded, the need to import candidates seen as winners wouldn’t have arisen. Counterintuitively, the newcomers see the BJP as a good platform to pitch them back into relevance in power. The NCP or the Congress are not seen as winners. Shiv Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray may have a point when he asks why, if there is indeed a Narendra Modi wave persisting after the tide of favour the party had secured in the Lok Sabha elections, was he going to go on the stump in as many as 25 locations on a blistering pace, all in about nine days from 4 October? It is BJP’s double insurance. This is the insurance number two. According to a calculation that Pramod Mahajan had shared with me way back in 2005 after the alliance’s failure to wrest back power it had from 1995 to 1999, contesting separately would keep the party cadre in good spirit, making each of the constituents an energetic contributor to the party’s health. His arithmetic then was that if they fought separately they would still get enough to cobble themselves in a post-poll alliance to get back into the driver’s seat. That may well have been the case, and it was to have been attempted in 2009 but his death put paid to his plan. The next rank, comprising Gopinath Munde and Nitin Gokhale were comfortable with it, but in the absence of Mahajan, lacked the nerve to forge ahead. The issue centred on how to break without bitterness. After Munde passed away, the idea became difficult. However, this does not explain why the party chose to remain in alliance with the Sena for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, except that the high stakes involved needed an exception to be made. The Sena had expected the alliance to continue on old ratios of seat sharing. The BJP lacked finesse in executing the plan for present elections though it was bolstered by the idea that Modi would drive them into Assembly. As political scientist Suhas Palshikar explains in The Indian Express, the two parties had their “complementarity exhausted” by 2003 itself, “had to compromise on their expansion plans and remain limited forces in state politics”. Even when they entered state’s politics, each had a limited reach. What he says about NCP-Congress is equally true of the saffron alliance: the coalition had become “uncomfortable burdens for the partners”. I think, the Sena more so for the BJP. While the rush to admit newcomers and assign tickets to them, which add up to as many as 40, some with not a best profile, excluded its own party who wanted to use the perceived wave to grow in the party. Some were tired of voting, and get votes for the partners with nothing in return for their own career graphs. There was disenchantment in such Sena held seats. But respect for newcomers is seen locally as denial of the claims and rights of the workers. Not all of them see getting the party, regardless of the candidate’s earlier political identity, into power their duty. Due to fear of losing future options, they may remain silent but necessarily be forced to compete with the imported candidate’s own workers to ensure a victory to secure the patronage. Patronage is the oxygen on which workers sustain themselves. This is not the best situation to be. Either for the party or the workers, for the Mahajan plan was to energise the party’s loyal cadre. That plan has gone awry and the old-timers who sweated for 25 years see the fruits going to someone else. Even in a party like the BJP, there are a lot of people who put their growth ahead of most other things. If the multipolar contest doesn’t yield the desired results, then the BJP had it. It would have to wrestle with new problems.