Dump Shiv Sena, dump it not: BJP mulls options

The Bharatiya Janata Party, miffed with the way its partner Shiv Sena has been treating it of late, has three options before it. It is obviously working on all three of them. One, teach the partner a lesson for its indiscretions. This is its first and immediate priority and is being unravelled already. Two, prepare for elections to the Lok Sabha and the Maharashtra Assembly in 2014. Three, look at a post-Bal Thackeray scenario when Uddhav Thackeray would perhaps have lesser relevance than now, more so because of the rise of his cousin, Raj Thackeray and his Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. What are recent irritants that have peeved the BJP, which has been content to play second fiddle and ride piggyback on the Sena, despite its national status? One, as Nitin Gadkari, BJP chief has publicly said, telephone calls to the Thackerays are not accepted, which means absolute lack of a conversation between the two parties, which in turn means growing mistrust. For another, the Ramdas Athavale-led Republican Party of India was inducted into the alliance without as much as even taking the consent of the BJP. To top it, Shiv Sena’s mouthpiece, Saamna, has been going on a spree of bad-mouthing it. Critical appraisal of a party by an independent newspaper is one thing but a partner’s mouthpiece saying adverse things about it has quite a different importance, especially during the run-up to the all-important civic polls in Mumbai. There are snubs one too many for the BJP. [caption id=“attachment_225213” align=“alignright” width=“380” caption=“Most of the Sena cadre is loyal more to the founder-patriarch than to the son, who is the successor. PTI”]  [/caption] Look at the first option. The BJP has shown its inclination to prop up Raj Thackeray and his MNS’s claim to the mayor’s post in Nashik — a red rag to the Sena, especially Uddhav. It has secured the commitment of two corporators from the Muslim League in Nagpur to ensure BJP claims power there. In fact, the BJP is even planning to secure the support of the Bahujan Samaj Party in Maharashtra’s official second capital, to counter the RPI, . That is another way of thumbing the nose. The BSP has been showing some firm trends in its growth and it is going to do so in the future by eating into the RPI’s Dalit base, which continues to be disenchanted with its tendency to split like an amoeba, rather than strengthen as a single entity. Various RPI factions are driven by the personal ambitions of their leaders, more than a single Dalit cause. That is one thing which would make Mayawati focus on Maharashtra in the future. Now, the second option — 2014 elections without the Sena and with the MNS as ally. The MNS has emerged as an independent third force which neither asked nor gave any quarter from any party. This, however, is a step laden with risks because MNS’s anti-migrant ideology circumscribes it to cities which see migrants as a problem, taking away jobs from the locals and overcrowding them. The MNS remains untested in the rural areas. In the recent elections, despite bagging 112 civic seats – nine per cent of the 1,244 seats across ten civic corporations – it managed only 19 out of 1,639 in the Zilla Parishads and 43 Panchayat Samiti seats of the total 3,247. Its show, of course, has been remarkable where the anti-migrant nuance plus the Marathi manoos stance enabled it to ride over the Sena’s as well as the Congress-NCP alliance votes. Take Nashik where MNS not only made rapid strides but also has huge ambitions to show-case its ability to run a government, even if limited to a growing city. MNS’s anti-migrant agitation in the past had found resonance there because like other cities, migrants had become visible in the industrial and service sectors and irked the locals. They saw the city going the Mumbai way and now, when MNS seemed viable, they voted for it. But MNS has a long way to go before it grows from a less than nominal party in the rural areas to be of some reckoning. It has to develop a strategy that overcomes the limitations of the migrant issue which has no meaning to that geography. A migrant is not an issue there; they themselves try to migrate to urban areas. This is a huge minus in the arithmetic being worked by the BJP. The third option of a formulation where the BJP sails with the MNS and forces the Sena, diminished and hungry, to either waste away or come into a triangle formation seems plausible. That gives ample scope in time for the MNS to develop a platform that is further anti-Sena, anti-Uddhav but be loyal to Bal Thackeray’s loyalty. Most of the Sena cadre is loyal more to the founder-patriarch than to the son, who is the successor. This is pretty tough arithmetic to work out but political parties work on a combination of calculations and gambles, and Nitin Gadkari is a combative politician who has as large a stake, perhaps more, in Maharashtra than as a national president. After all, Pramod Mahajan, a year before he passed away, had crafted and initiated the process which would have led his party not to contest the 2009 without Sena’s partnership. Mahajan’s perspective was less a conflict with the Sena though all along the relationship between the partners was tense, often requiring him to soothe the nerves of Bal Thackeray, playing on his ego, and getting some concession or the other. Uddhav was not easy to deal with though Raj Thackeray; he had found, understood politics and had a sense of the dare. And by contesting elections on one’s own strength helps keep the party cadre active which is not the case when a constituency is taken in an election by the partner. The cadre immediately goes into a kind of dazed aloofness because the winner, having used the crutch, prefers its own interests to the rivals. Even in such contests both parties could manage the same number of seats as they would have if it was an alliance. A party depends on the committed votes and the strength of the cadre. In this alliance, BJP has been a loser and Mahajan had wanted to change that. Political wisdom is that a party grows only by contesting elections when the cadre can be stirred, showing the cadre the prospect of gains to be made. In areas where it is a second fiddle, the party erodes, because a winning party wants to retain the constituency, not rotate it.