Is BJP’s Maha strategy guided by past experience?
SUCH PACTS DIDN’T LAST IN THE PAST AS THEY WERE ARRIVED AT OUT OF POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY BETWEEN IDEOLOGICALLY OPPOSED ENTITIES
NEWDELHI:The rotational arrangement for the chief minister’s office the Shiv Sena is seeking in Maharashtra has been tried before with limited success in Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh (UP). The stakeholders kept their part of the bargain only in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) when it was a full-fledged state of the Union.
Such pacts didn’t last in the past largely because they were arrived at out of political expediency between ideologically opposed entities.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was the common factor in the failed experiments in UP and Karnataka with the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Janata Dal (Secular) respectively.
But in Jammu and Kashmir, the deal worked and lasted between the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the Congress between 2002 and 2008. There, Mufti Mohammed Sayed stepped down to let Ghulam Nabi Azad have his three-year stint as chief minister.
The maiden attempt at equal distribution of power between post-poll allies in a hung assembly was in 1997.
The BSP’s Mayawati completed her pre-arranged six month term with the BJP’s support but pulled the rug from under Kalyan Singh’s feet at the very start of his turn as the CM.
The BJP regime survived, nevertheless, with the support of Congress rebels led by Naresh
Aggarwal whose reward for the rescue act was a plum portfolio.
Mayawati nixed the pact for what she called Singh’s “anti-Dalit” mindset that had him put administrative caveats on registration of cases under the Scheduled Caste and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act in the state.
The differences in points of view were too much to overcome. If Mayawati’s strict, at times retributive, usage of the law alienated the saffron party’s coresupporters, its dilution, often bordering on disuse, angered the BSP’s sociopolitical base.
A similar face-off between social identities resurfaced two decades later in UP and other Hindi heartland states, notably Madhya Pradesh.
Such was the pressure on the Centre that a Supreme Court judgment prescribing safeguards against the law’s misuse had to be legislatively reversed. Parliament restored its original provisions in 2018.
The Karnataka case dates back to 2007. The BJP-JD (S) coalition cracked when HD Deve Gowda refused to have power transferred from his son and chief minister HD Kumaraswamy to BS Yediyurappa.
He gave his stand against BSY as chief minister an ideological colour, arguing that he could not let the Sangh Parivar turn Karnataka
into a “Hindutva laboratory”.
In the context of experience, it can be argued that the rightwing affinity between the BJP and the Shiv Sena might help make the rotational arrangement work. Ideologically, they’re on the same page, holding similar positions on issues as contentious as Kashmir, Ayodhya and the Uniform Civil Code (UCC).
But in reality, the power tussle between them is over retaining and reclaiming their respective turfs in Maharashtra.
The BJP won’t let go of its lately acquired senior-stakeholder badge even as the Sena is desperate to have it back. At another level, it’s time for Uddhav Thackeray to settle scores for the short shrift he believes his party has got from the BJP at the Centre and in the state since 2014.