Too many seats not enough candidates? BJP resorts to poaching in Maharashtra

Mumbai: It is just possible that a few withdrawals by 30 September may change, but only just, the roster of candidates from each of the five main political parties for the October 15 Maharashtra Assembly elections.

But the fact remains that the party dying to emerge as the ruling party has had to depend on several defectors.

The list is long, and the swift change of loyalties of persons from one party to another has been quite befuddling. But as this small list shows, the drain has been largely from the Congress and the Nationalist Congress party to the Bharatiya Janata Party. There has been no reverse flow as the BJP is being seen as the winning party.

If the politician, especially one who held a post, including possibly the seat, decides to contest against his party’s official nominee, he or she is a rebel. Mostly that is as an independent. But when they move, as four-time MLA and environment minister Sanjay Deotale did, joining BJP an hour before nominations closed, and getting the ticket for Warora, it is a defection.

The entire incident bears a striking resemblance to the way the BJP secured candidates from other parties which made the massive win possible because then, people voted for the promised development agenda as against the pettifogging politics of those who were in power.

But whether the same the same logic can work in Maharashtra is not clear. The BJP-Sena rivalry has injected a new dimension to the polls.

This poaching underscores an interesting and also crucial point: The BJP did not have a list beyond the 117 of the 288 seat it normally gets to contest before divorcing the Shiv Sena.

The other logic in encouraging such defections is that by taking away a winner from a constituency, regardless of its prospects in the current elections, the BJP has successfully weakened its rival. If a minister or two or three switch sides, imagine the dismay among the cadre in the constituency and its spread to adjacent seats.

That the defectors from a pair of two parties which ruled together for 15 years opted to do so also indicates the realisation that their prospects of getting past the post was rather dismal, and that the BJP was the best horse to ride this time.

However, having to explain their new found love for the ‘communal” and “divisive” party would indeed be a task.

The time-consuming pretence of talks between the Sena and the BJP pushed the moment for the switch almost to the last minute. Assessing their chances by instinct – electoral politics can sometimes be a huge gamble - drove many into the arms of the BJP. And the BJP also needed that embrace.

Having to foray into the rivals’ ranks to find a candidate shows that the BJP had not been able to build strong potential candidates during its 25 years of marriage with the Shiv Sena. Till Narendra Modi arrived on the scene during the Lok Sabha polls, the party had believed that its destiny lay only in the Sena’s embrace, content to the 117 constituencies.

Coalition dynamics ensure that you do not aspire for too much in the constituencies that are earmarked for the partner.

Since 1989, if you list the seats contested or held by either, the picture is clear. Not many seats changed hands.

Like in the animal world, these were carved out turfs, except that these boundaries had more or less been carved in stone. The partner had only one role of supporting the other with hardly any hope in hell of improving its status because such a thing was just not permitted.

Little wonder that the BJP grabbed anyone willing to walk into its parlour.

Such shifts, if you look at some cases, of multiple shifts from one party to another over time, makes a mockery of the idea that there are adherents to a political ideology.

It exposes the public secret that one can change ideology as swiftly as one can change a cap. What till yesterday was good to fight for till yesterday is what you should fight against the next day.

It is called opportunism.