The theater that is Maharashtra-Part 1

All kind of political manoeuvring is taking place in Maharashtra. With assembly election barely a month later and code of conduct in force, most of the dealings are taking place in back room discussions. This time the theatre is set in so fashion that one is having a feast of drama. There all players of all hues and colours as well as numbers in the fray. So nobody actually knows what will be the ending of this play.

In the Lok Sabha elections, it was expected that ruling Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) will get a drubbing and Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will come out handsomely. But the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena played a perfect spoilsport to the Sena-BJP alliance. The result was that Congress emerged as frontrunner with 17 seats out of 48. Even though it shares power with NCP in state, Congress was in cloud seven when NCP suffered heavy losses managing to get only eight seats. Buoyed with this victory, Congress is bargaining for more seats this time for assembly elections. NCP being at receiving end is finding it hard to preserve its quota of seats at the level of year 2004. Interestingly, even though NCP had contested less seats last time, its tally of winning candidates was more than Congress in the assembly. Obviously enough, Congress does not want a repeat of that episode. Therefore it is trying to browbeat its rival-turned-ally in conceding more seats.

Upto now, elections in the state were limited to these four parties. But this time around, there are two-three more players who can give these parties a run for there money. Actually, MNS has already proved its mettle by eating up a large chunk of votes in Lok Sabha elections in April. However, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) could not prove to be a worthy threat to the main players. Its political TRP was no doubt high but the performance on ground was almost invisible. Even in constituencies like Pune, where it touted its social engineering formula as its main plank by fielding D. S. Kulkarni and every political analyst was putting his bet on the candidate, it failed miserably to prove up to expectations. MNS has a large base of Shiv Sena activists and its Marathi Manoos agenda is already making waves in the people. I have seen it in places like Marathwada that people are ready to trust MNS and anticipate a good performance from the hitherto new party. However, the people also have too many complaints about the party not living to the expectation. It is not uniform in its activities and it seems as going into a slumber at times. Moreover, some recent incidents have put the party activists in a bad light. Accusations like extortion, kidnapping, rape and threatening have been levelled against the partymen, cases being already filed against them. Raj Thackerey, chief of MNS has shown no clear sign of dissociating himself or his party from the dirty elements. How this will affect the prospect of the party in election is better left to the people. I am never ready to make a pronouncement in this matter, because the Indian public is very tolerant when it comes to electing their representative. There is no surety that a person with heaps of criminal records or corruption charges will not get elected.

As for BSP, failure is not new to the party. It is contesting elections for over two decades in the state and has yet to make any mark. Still, it has an appreciable endurance which can help it win a handful of seats. In the October elections though, BSP's ship might sail in rough weather as various Dalit parties with splinter Left groups have joined hands against Congress_NCP as well as Shiv Sena-BJP. This new front is to address the same audience to that of BSP hence there might be a clash of interest between them. Major constituents of new front come from various groups of Republican Party. The reason for their coming together was defeat of candidates like Ramdas Athavale and Rajendra Gawai, who have hitherto earned their bread and butter by aligning themselves with Congress or NCP leadership. A main drawback of this new front is that it has only leaders and no workers. Even the front is planning to contest all 288 seats, it has hardly any chance of winning at more than a dozen seats. That a leader like Dr. Prakash Ambedkar is not in the front further limits the prospects of the front.