What does alliance-shopping with a vengeance look like? It’s the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Amit Shah sealing one with the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra one day, closing another with the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu a day later, and running through the list of states where the party has friends, former allies or even frenemies. In the run-up to the general election 2019, any regional party can be an ally if it can bring in the Lok Sabha seats.
For this, he is clearly willing to smile, bend a bit, and appear more genial than his otherwise ruthless self. It cannot be easy to win people over, especially if there is bitterness and baggage in the relationship as there is in the BJP-Sena one. A natural alliance for 25 years, it went bust in September 2014 when the BJP, riding high on the ‘Modi wave’ and a stupendous Lok Sabha victory, called it off overnight leaving the Sena stunned.
The two parties then contested the Maharashtra Assembly election independently but, a month later, insufficient numbers forced the BJP to reach out to the Sena to form the government.
Sena: the Foe & the Friend, too!
The ‘Tiger’ has not forgotten that. Since 2015, the Sena has been BJP’s worst critic – constantly carping on issues, throwing shade at Prime Minister Modi, denouncing policies of governments it is part of, even reiterating Congress President Rahul Gandhi’s slogan “Chowkidar Chor Hai”.
But the two have stuck together – to be in power. Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray grandly proclaimed at every available opportunity that the party would go alone in the 2019 polls, both Lok Sabha and state Assembly. The party even passed a resolution to that effect in its national executive last year.
That was before 5 February, when Prashant Kishore trooped in to Mumbai and met Thackeray at the latter’s bungalow in Bandra, Matoshree. A political strategist credited with stage-managing Modi’s campaign in 2013-14, Kishore is currently vice president in Janata Dal (United). But his trip to Matoshree was as Shah’s emissary though all three pretend otherwise. Within days, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis cut short his official trip to Vidarbha and went to Matoshree for a heart-to-heart chat with Thackeray.
On 18 February, hours after Shah had been to Matoshree, he took centre stage with Thackeray and Fadnavis at the press conference announcing the alliance. The final round of negotiation, sources said, happened only between Thackeray and Shah.
Everyone else gathered saw plates of pohe (a snack made from puffed rice) and sheera (sweet made from sooji rawa, called sooji halwa in the north) being taken in to the room. Even the backroom boys who had worked towards this had to be content outside.
“In many communities across Maharashtra, in the patriarchal system of “seeing girls” for marriages, alliances are made – or unmade – over pohe and sheera served to the boy’s family. This renewed and renegotiated alliance between the BJP and Sena has been made – for now. There are no guarantees in this relationship.”
Why the BJP Needs Sena
The alliance is the need of the hour for both the parties. It is the demand of electoral arithmetic. This alliance is unlike their natural alliance that used to be in the 1990s and quite different in texture from the one that late Bal Thackeray and Pramod Mahajan presided over. This is a deal, an agreement; not a bond really. There is no love lost between the two parties now.
The BJP of pre-2019 would not have agreed, much less come knocking to make it happen. But in the scenario after the Assembly election results in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in December 2018, the BJP has been cobbling together a Mahagathbandhan of its own while deriding the Opposition for doing so. How could Sena not be part of it?
The 2014 Lok Sabha results from Maharashtra – BJP, Sena and an ally had won 42 of the state’s 48 seats – are not replicable if the mood on the ground is anything to go by. Also, it helped then that the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party were not in alliance. The Congress’ Mahagathbandhan was stitched early this time round.
Of the 42, the BJP had won 23 of the 24 it contested, and the Sena picked up 18 of the 20 it contested. Shah declared that they would mop up 45 seats this year. His panna pramukhs apart, BJP’s workers are not convinced yet that they can pull off a decent tally. Splitting the saffron vote would have hurt. The BJP needed the Sena on its side.
Why the Sena Needs the BJP
It was even more urgent for the Sena to have the BJP by its side, irrespective of the bluster that Thackeray and his lieutenant Sanjay Raut, MP and editor of the party’s Marathi daily Saamna, regularly showed last few years (See below ‘How the Tune Changed’). Thackeray made it sound as if he had extracted a great deal from Shah – farm loan waiver, cancellation of the controversial refinery project in verdant Nanar in Konkan, waiver of property tax for small flats in Mumbai – before agreeing to the alliance.
It sounded good, it was not the complete truth. Thackeray needed the alliance for the Assembly election. He was facing at least three issues.
- One, the internal pre-poll surveys by the party showed that it would drop more than half of its Lok Sabha seats and Assembly seats if it contested independent of the BJP which would have hastened its decline and relevance.
- Two, many of its elected representatives, both MPs and MLAs, let it be known to Thackeray that they could not win without an alliance.
- Three, the Assembly election looms larger than the Lok Sabha.
Thackeray doesn’t have much skin in the Lok Sabha game. Sharing power with the BJP in Delhi does not greatly improve his stature or the spread of his party despite its claim as the real Hindutva party.
In fact, his initial ire came from the fact that the Sena had been allotted insignificant ministries in the union cabinet and Modi-Shah did not even care to take him along on important decisions. Given a choice, he would prefer a BJP leader other than Modi, a Modi-mukt BJP as it were.
Maha Assembly: the Sena’s Real Game
Thackeray’s sights are set on the Maharashtra Assembly election, to be held before October this year. In 2014, the Sena had managed to win 63 of the 288 seats, about half of the BJP’s tally of 122. Any decrease and its role might be marginal. The stakes are high but the road ahead is rough for this renewed alliance as developments in the last two days show.
Fadnavis said at the joint presser that Assembly seats and important ministries would be equally divided between the allies. He hinted that the party with the higher tally would keep the CM’s post. Aditya Thackeray, Uddhav’s son and Yuva Sena president, tweeted that the chief minister’s chair would also be shared equally, two and half years each by the BJP and Sena. Discord has set in.
Shah and Fadnavis played a clever game there, Thackeray walked into it. The 50:50 seat split is to come into force after they have given seats to their friendly smaller allies. The BJP has at least three; the Sena none. So they might contest 140 seats each of the 288. Irrespective of who wins how many, the BJP will have its smaller allies to fall back on to make up the numbers.
A livid Sena leadership doesn’t find the “good deal” so good any longer and finds it hard to explain it to its cadre how “the Sena’s saffron will be atop the State secretariat”.
BJP-Sena Pact: Bitter, but a Necessary Pill
There will be more drama in the months to come but the BJP will take it in its stride; it needs the numbers. Uttar Pradesh which gave it 71 Lok Sabha seats in 2014 has an unlikely – but strong – alliance between the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party; Akshilesh Yadav and Mayawati together could seriously dent its numbers. The three states which the party lost in December – Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh – have 65 Lok Sabha seats of which the BJP had bagged 62 last election. It would be hard to repeat that success.
In Karnataka, where the BJP had won 17 of the 28 seats in 2014, the Congress and Janata Dal (Secular) have joined forces, however unfriendly they seem. In Andhra Pradesh, N Chandrababu Naidu has severed ties with the BJP while the Telangana Rashtra Samithi is keeping the BJP waiting. The two states together account for 42 seats. The BJP’s Kerala campaign does not seem to be yielding great electoral possibilities yet.
That leaves Tamil Nadu with its 39 Lok Sabha seats. The AIADMK had made a clean sweep last time with 37 seats but J Jayalalithaa’s demise and factionalism will affect the tally. The DMK (and the CPI-m) is already part of the Congress-led UPA Mahagathbandhan with its leader MK Stalin declaring Rahul Gandhi as the prime ministerial candidate. The BJP, which had won only one seat in 2014, was left with no option but to seal the alliance with the AIADMK. It will contest only five seats.
West Bengal (42 seats) and Odisha (21 seats) are two other states with strong regional parties where the BJP will find little traction. The former with Trinamool Congress is inimical to Modi-Shah and in the latter, Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal has ruled out an alliance with the BJP and Congress. In Maharashtra, even the Shiv Sainiks have begun to quote the example of these strong regional parties which have stood up to the BJP.
After mocking the idea of Mahagathbandhan of the Opposition parties, the BJP is on an overdrive to seal one such of its own. Thackeray helped it along.
(Smruti Koppikar, Mumbai-based journalist and editor, writes on politics, urban issues, gender and media. She tweets at @smrutibombay. This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses, nor is responsible for them.)
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