BJP makes deep inroads, jolts Sena
Riding on the Narendra Modi wave, the BJP has crossed the century- mark in the Assembly polls in Maharashtra, a feat last time achieved by the Congress in 1990.
Making deep inroads into the Congress and NCP bastions, the Bharatiya Janata Party gave a jolt to the Shiv Sena, which was its “elder brother” in the saffron alliance that collapsed before the polls.
In the 1990 Assembly polls, the Congress had secured as many as 141 seats. Since then, no national or regional party had come anywhere near the 100- mark.
Though the party has failed to reach the halfway mark of 144, the BJP’s record is impressive this time as it is getting nearly three times the seats it secured in the 2009 Assembly polls when its tally was 47.
The BJP tally this time is more than the combined figure of 92 seats it had won along with the Shiv Sena in the last polls. This indicated that the gamble played by Prime Minister Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah has more than paid off.
The two parties had together secured as many as 138 seats in 1995 ( BJP- 65, Shiv Sena- 73) when they had formed the first nonCongress coalition government in the state.
In 1990, the first Assembly polls jointly contested by the BJP and the Shiv Sena had seen the BJP secure just 42 seats out of 104 it contested and the Shiv Sena won 52 out of the 183 allotted to it. Late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan was the architect of the BJP- Shiv Sena alliance, the oldest ideological partnership of the BJP.
With Mahajan striking a rapport with late Bal Thackeray, the Shiv Sena supremo had offered the deputy chief ministership to the national party, which was till recently playing the second fiddle in the state.
In 1985, the Bharatiya Janata Party contested 67 Assembly seats and had won only 16 when the Congress dominance was at its peak after the assassination of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
At that time, the Congress had won 161 out of the 287 seats it contested, securing 43.55 per cent votes.
With Sharad Pawar parting ways with the Congress in 1999, the Congress vote got divided and since then, the party was sharing power with the NCP for the last 15 years.