Both Shiv Sena and BJP will lose in this fight: RSS chief Bhagwat
NAGPUR: Weighing in on the recently divorced BJP and the Shiv Sena over the goverment formation in Maharashtra, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat cautioned that “selfishness” is a bad thing.
“Everybody knows that both of them will face loss if they are going to fight over a matter,” he said. “Everyone knows that selfishness is a bad thing but very few people give up their selfishness. Take the example of the country or of individuals.”
The comments from the RSS c h i e f c a me wh i l e h e wa s addressing an event in Nagpur on Tuesday morning.
Long-time allies, the Shiv Sena and the BJP, who contested the polls together, dithered over government formation in Maharashtra after the former insisted on rotational chief ministership.
The BJP, on its part, denied agreeing to any such demand. Soon after the Shiv Sena’s lone MP, Arvind Sawant, resigned from the Cabinet. With no party in a position to stake claim for power, the President’s rule was imposed in the state last week.
Since then the Sena, which bagged 56 seats in the state polls, has been in talks with the NCP and the Congress to stitch up an alliance and has expressed confidence that a Sena chief minister will be ruling Maharashtra.
While the BJP emerged as the single-largest party in Maharashtra assembly polls with 105 seats, the NCP and the Congress have 54 and 44 MLAS, respectively, in the state Assembly.
NEWDELHI: In Indian politics, fair play, morality and propriety are often used as terms of convenience – to be preached more, and practised less.
The Maharashtra imbroglio, therefore, isn’t about broken pacts or promises. It’s as crass as a power tussle can get. We’ve seen glimpses of it in Karnataka, Goa and Meghalaya. Haryana witnessed it more recently.
Most post-poll pacts the media terms “unholy” are stratagem overriding ideology to overwhelm adversaries i n t he absence of decisive mandates. The route got traversed first in the formation of the short-lived Samyutka Vidhayak Dal (SVD) regimes in the 1960s. It acquired credence again in the 1980s, when Rajiv Gandhi rode on a sympathy wave after Indira Gandhi’s assassination to log a brute majority in the Lok Sabha.
The man who then returned to the drawing board was the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) LK Advani. To tame the leviathan the Congress was, he tied up with the rabble-rousing Shiv Sena. The “proximate” bunny hop he later did with the Marxists to prop up the post-bofors VP Singh government consolidated antiCongressism like never before, dislodging Rajiv Gandhi from power.
Advani, at that point, termed the pact with the Sena as a tactical move to sharpen the BJP’S Hindutva. Its culmination was his withdrawal of support to the VP Singh government on the Ram temple issue.
A reverse application of the Advani template can explain the equally glaring expediency of the Congress-nationalistic Congress Party (NCP) alliance in working out a governance arrangement with the hitherto “untouchable” Sena. In realpolitik terms, it tears the BJP away from its foremost ideological ally, denting the very Hindutva that brought them together.
Why alliance-building is now taking time is a no-brainer. For its durability and popular accept