AKHILESH YADAV
the NCP had a covert agreement with the BJP. In Gondia, the NCP joined hands with the BJP, with the latter’s candidate winning the president’s post and the NCP’S elected vice president. The Congress was kept out. In a seeming tit-for-tat in neighbouring Bhandara, the Congress joined with the BJP to get its candidate elected president and the BJP’S vice president.
There is a trust deficit in the Congress about Pawar and the NCP. Before the 2014 Assembly election, Pawar had a clandestine understanding with the BJP that resulted in a break-up of the established Shiv SENA-BJP and Congress-ncp alliances. Each fought the elections separately, with the NCP and BJP staying out of each other’s territories. The BJP garnered the maximum number of seats and was hunting for allies. The NCP offered outside support, since Pawar was wary of crossing the secularhindutva divide. The BJP was keen that the NCP ally with it formally, and Narendra Modi and the late Arun Jaitley even visited Pawar in his stronghold of Baramati. Ultimately, the BJP formed the government with the help of the Shiv Sena but the activities in between only proved yet again Pawar’s hold on Maharashtra politics.
Pawar has honed his political instincts over the past five decades to the point where he knows exactly when to go for the kill. The 2019 alliance with the Sena was a master stroke. It must have been a time of extreme tension, of walking on eggshells, but one would not have known it, looking at Pawar. The only time his brow was creased was when his nephew Ajit Pawar, when the
MVA was thought to be a done deal, announced that he, along with some independent MLAS, had joined the BJP and that they had the required majority. Ajit
Pawar said he had already taken his oath as Deputy Chief Minister at dawn at the Raj Bhavan. That shook the
Maratha strongman but it did not defeat him. The matter was soon resolved.
Despite being the architect of the
MVA, he does not bother to put out small fires within the coalition, especially when they are between the Shiv
Sena and the Congress. For long, the
Congress has felt itself slighted in the
State of its birth. From ruling the
State for almost four decades the
Congress suddenly finds itself as the juniormost partner in government.
Plum posts are given to members of the Sena and NCP. Moreover, the
Congress has a firm ideology that is in conflict with the Sena’s. However, the pragmatist in Pawar accepts, without compromising on his party’s core ideology of secularism, that there has to be flexibility for the alliance to survive.
Lyla Bavadam
The role that Akhilesh Yadav, SP president and former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister will play in any national opposition alliance against the BJP is a matter of much debate in political circles for one main reason: Uttar Pradesh, as the most populous State in the country, sends 80 members to the Lok Sabha. The principal opposition party in the State is expected to provide an effective counter to a BJP led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has won twice from Varanasi.
In the past, both the SP and Akhilesh Yadav have raised hopes about mounting a serious challenge to the BJP but have repeatedly failed to live up to them. However, the consensus among political observers and practitioners now is that the situation will be different in 2024. One main reason for this is the spirited fight the SP, along with allies such as Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD), Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP), Mahan Dal and the Janwadi Party (Socialist), put up in the 2022 Assembly election, literally making the contest a bipolar one.
In the process, the seat share of the Bjp+allies dropped from 322 in 2017 to 273, while that of the SP alliance rose from 52 to 125. The BJP’S seat share came down to 255. The SP’S vote share went up by a whopping 10.26 per cent, from 21.8 per cent in 2017 to 32.06 per cent in 2022. The allies chipped in with about 4 per cent for a combined vote share of 36.1 per cent.
The Assembly seat numbers when mapped against the Lok Sabha seats in the State point to the SP alliance being ahead in as many 24 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats. The SP’S much-touted alliance with Mayawati’s BSP won only 15 seats.
There are other interesting statistics: Of the 255 seats the BJP won, in 63 the margin was less than 10,000 votes, and in eight it was less than 1,000. In 19, the margin was between 1,000 and 5,000, while 36 seats had a margin of 5,000 to 10,000 votes. Political analysts say the BJP and its allies may face a stiff contest in another 15 to 18 seats in 2024. How these projections will shape up is hard to tell, but there is little doubt that the expectations from the SP and Akhilesh are higher than ever before.
Post-election, the SP alliance was predicted to collapse but nothing of the sort has happened yet. RLD chief Jayant Choudhary has been elected to the Rajya Sabha as the alliance candidate. Besides, the SP leadership drew former Congress leader Kapil Sibal into its fold and sent him too to the Rajya Sabha as an independent candidate. These are clear signals that the SP and Akhilesh Yadav are