Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s two-day visit to Maharashtra is expected to give a big boost to the State and local units of the BJP ahead of the crucial civic polls, particularly the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) election scheduled for February next year.
On Sunday, Mr. Shah will lay the foundation stone of Chhatrapati Shivaji’s statue within the PMC premises and unveil a bust of Babasaheb Ambedkar at the entrance of the newly constructed civic building.
According to analysts, the BJP’s play around the Maratha warrior king and the greatest Dalit leader appears to be a calculated one at a time when the ire of both the Maratha and OBC communities is directed against the tripartite ‘Maha Vikas Aghadi’ government of the Shiv Sena, the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress for having failed to ensure reservation for them.
“The BJP wants to capitalise on the prevailing sentiment against the MVA for having allegedly bungled in ensuring that the Maratha quota law, passed by the erstwhile Devendra Fadnavis-led BJP government stuck in the Supreme Court. Now, the OBC community is on the boil for what it perceives as the MVA’s inexplicable delay in collecting the empirical data required for giving political reservation to the community,” says senior city-based analyst Rajendra Pandharpure.
After sweeping all six seats in urban Pune in the 2014 Maharashtra Assembly election, the BJP cemented its gains by clocking record wins in the 2017 civic polls to the cash-rich PMC and the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC).
The BJP had bagged an unprecedented 97 of the total 162 seats in the PMC while supplanting the NCP from the PCMC (winning 77 of the 128 seats) in a personal blow to Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar, who lost control of his bastion of Pimpri-Chinchwad.
Whereas the BJP dominates the PMC, the three MVA allies together have just 58 seats, with the NCP having the highest seats (39) after the BJP, while the Sena and the Congress have a mere 10 and nine seats respectively.
Given the Congress and the NCP’s focus of expanding their respective bases in Pune, it is far from certain the three parties will jointly contest the PMC poll.
“The Congress has a good chunk of traditional voters in Pune, but has been badly hamstrung by insipid leadership at both the district, State and national levels. In contrast, despite Pune BJP leaders Girish Bapat and Mukta Tilak not being able to focus on the district, the PMC is being keenly watched by regional BJP leaders like Devendra Fadnavis and the Home Minister [Mr. Shah] himself,” observes Mr. Pandharpure.
BJP’s moves
Mr. Shah’s laying of the foundation stone of the Shivaji statue and the unveiling of Ambedkar’s bust signifies the BJP’s determination to expand its Maratha and Ambedkarite bases.
There is a recent pattern to this, beginning with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent statements on a Shivaji rising to stand up to the tyranny of Aurangzeb during the inauguration of the Kashi Vishwanath corridor in Varanasi.
This was followed by BJP Maharashtra unit president Chandrakant Patil’s controversial remark that Shivaji created the ‘Hindu vote bank’ that was realised and brought to fruition in recent times by (senior BJP leaders) Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani and Prime Minister Modi.
“While the Brahmin voters are likely to stick with the BJP, the party is attempting to expand its Maratha and Ambedkarite base in urban areas in Pune, particularly western Maharashtra, which has long been the preserve of sugar barons affiliated to the NCP. It was this thinking which prompted the party to give ticket to Anil Shirole, a known Maratha face, from the Pune Lok Sabha seat during the 2014 Parliamentary election instead of Girish Bapat, a natural contender for that seat. Likewise, Sanjay Patil, another Maratha face, was the BJP’s candidate for the Sangli LS seat,” said an election watcher.
Also noteworthy during this visit is Mr. Shah’s rebuff of NCP chief Sharad Pawar’s invite to visit the Vasantdada Sugar Institute (VSI), an autonomous and influential body headed by Mr. Pawar.
Instead, Mr. Shah chose to attend a State-level sugar conclave at Pravaranagar in Ahmednagar district at the behest of senior BJP leader Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil, one of Mr. Pawar’s bitterest rivals in Maharashtra’s fluid politics.
In 2016, Mr. Modi had visited the VSI despite sharp political barbs traded between Mr. Modi and the Pawar clan at the time of the 2014 Lok Sabha and Maharashtra Assembly election.
“This time, with Sharad Pawar actively seen as anchoring a mega-coalition against the BJP at the Centre while being hailed as the architect of the anti-BJP MVA alliance in Maharashtra, Mr. Shah perhaps decided it would be unwise to publicly associate with Mr. Pawar at the VSI. After all, his tour is meant to charge up the BJP rank-and-file in Maharashtra to break the NCP and the Congress in the coming civic polls,” opined another analyst.
