Decode Politics: Why BJP fell from 23 to 9 in Maharashtra

Some factors behind this result:

* Sympathy for Uddhav Thackeray, Sharad Pawar

The state never settled down courtesy the BJP after the party failed to secure a majority in the 2019 Assembly elections. However, while it may have come back into power by breaking first the Shiv Sena and the NCP, the BJP left the voters unimpressed.

Instead, the sympathy factor seems to have benefited the original leaders of the Sena and NCP, from under whose noses their parties were seen as “stolen” – Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar, respectively.

Uddhav, who was projected as the face of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition – or INDIA – in Maharashtra, won nine of the 21 seats it contested. This was two more than the Shinde-led Sena, which contested 15 seats and won seven.

In the split, the Shinde Sena, which walked away with most of the united Sena’s MLAs and MPs, had got both the name of the party and its symbol. Still, that didn’t come in the Uddhav faction’s way.

Similar was the case with the Ajit Pawar-led NCP, which won the name and the symbol after breaking away from the party created and bred by Sharad Pawar. While Pawar Senior again came up on top, with an impressive strike rate of winning seven of the 10 seats it contested, Ajit’s NCP could win just 1 of the five seats it fought.

Better, in the biggest prestige battle of Maharashtra, Pawar’s daughter Supriya Sule beat Ajit’s wife Sunetra in Baramati, a Pawar family bastion that had been nurtured by Ajit for long.

* OBCs versus Marathas

Ultimately, Marathwada with eight seats proved the albatross around the BJP’s neck, with the party paying a price for the poor management of the Maratha quota agitation by the state government. The BJP failed to win any of the seats in Marathwada.

The government’s flip-flop on the issue was seen as driven by essentially the BJP, with the other two partners in power, Sena and NCP, led by Maratha leaders Shinde and Ajit, respectively. While the aggressive campaign by activist Manoj Jarange Patil forced the BJP to eventually bring in a 10% quota for the Marathas, the delay was considered by many as a cynical move by the party to consolidate the OBCs behind it in a case of reverse polarisation.

Eventually, even that didn’t happen, despite the OBCs previously proving a solid BJP vote bank.

Days to go for the elections, the BJP wooed long-time Congress leader and former CM Ashok Chavan into its fold, in a move to bolster its Maratha credentials. But that too failed.

In 2019, the BJP had seen sweeping wins in Beed, Jalna, Nanded and Latur seats. In 2024, even BJP national secretary Pankaja Munde, the daughter of one of the BJP’s tallest OBC leaders, the late Gopinath Munde, lost, to NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar) candidate Bajrang Sonwane in Beed.

* Dalit drift

In the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP’s performance rested to some extent on its ability to win over Dalits. However, this time, the INDIA bloc’s narrative of an overwhelming BJP majority government being a threat to the Constitution seems to have struck home. Voices were heard from Dalit settlements about alterations in the statute created by Dr B R Ambedkar and threat to the protections provided in it for them.

At 10.5%, Dalits are a formidable vote bank in Maharashtra – with the state seen as Ambedkar’s karmabhoomi – and their apprehension regarding the BJP seems to have found reflection in the party’s performance in Vidarbha, Marathwada and Mumbai.

The BJP tried to debunk this narrative. But in an admission that the party did not succeed, its Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis said after the results: “Unfortunately, the Opposition set a false narrative to mislead the people.”

In its stronghold Vidarbha region, the BJP won only two seats out of the total seven it contested, while the Shinde Sena lost in all its three seats. While senior BJP leader Nitin Gadkari retained Nagpur, the high-profile constituency holding the RSS headquarters, his victory margin fell to 1.20 lakh in 2019.

Apart from the RSS and Gadkari link, Nagpur is also the home pitch of Fadnavis and state BJP chief Chandrashekhar Bawankule.

* Agrarian unrest

With 55% of the state rural, agriculture has always driven the politics of Maharashtra. It is not for no reason that Sharad Pawar ensured he held the Agriculture portfolio in his stints as Union minister.

If there is the sugarcane belt in western Maharashtra, soyabean and cotton are predominant in Vidarbha and Marathwada region, and onion in North Maharashtra. Across these regions, farmer angst was evident. The vagaries of climate challenges, coupled with the flip flop on agriculture policies, had left the farmers angry.

The Centre’s decision to impose a 40% duty on onions followed by a ban on exports also did not go down well.