Can Eknath Shinde survive the border row with Karnataka?

Less than six months after Eknath Shinde broke away from the mother party to form a government in alliance with the BJP, things seem to be unravelling for him every which way.

The biggest threats posed to him have come from an unexpected source – his new ally, the Bharatiya Janata Party, thus proving that former chief minister Uddhav Thackeray was right all along in suspecting that all that the BJP wanted was to destroy his party. 

As the winter session of the Maharashtra Assembly got underway in Nagpur, the state’s winter capital, this month, allegations surfaced against Shinde that he had allotted five acres of land reserved for slum dwellers in Nagpur to a group of private builders against bitter opposition from the Nagpur Improvement Trust. Amid clamour for his resignation in the Assembly by the Maha Vikas Aghadi, former deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar made a startling revelation – that the leak to the Nationalist Congress Party which first flagged the issue had come from BJP sources.

Soon the plot began to unravel - make Shinde’s position so untenable that he would have to resign. The bulk of his MLAs would be induced to merge with the BJP and Devendra Fadnavis would finally realise his dream of becoming chief minister again.

Shinde hastily withdrew his allocation of the land to the private builders and returned it to the NIT and the matter was papered over. But the other threat will simply not go away as easily -  the border row between Maharashtra and Karnataka. That has been the theme of the current winter session with the MVA leading a sustained campaign and NCP Maharashtra unit president Jayant Patil suspended from attending the House for the duration of the session just because he sought some hard answers from the government about who started the fire on the borders after everything had calmed down over the years. Patil also wrote to Chief Twit Elon Musk seeking his help in getting to the bottom of the use of  Twitter to reignite the fire.

The fact is that it is the BJP in Karnataka which has rekindled the issue and the MVA is blaming Karnataka chief minister Basavraj Bommai for starting the whole row with a tweet that some 40 villages on the Maharashtra side of the border wanted to integrate with Karnataka. While Bommai has denied this and said his account was hacked, Maharashtra’s politicians are unconvinced though BJP leaders in the state can hardly say much against Bommai considering he belongs to their own party.

So, after a joint meeting by Shinde and Fadnavis in New Delhi last week with Union home minister Amit Shah and another slated for this week separately by the duo, Fadnavis has come out with a statement that Maharashtra will not cede an inch of land to Karnataka even as Uddhav Thackeray demanded that the disputed areas be converted to a union territory. 

However, it is Shinde who is in the most unsustainable position on this issue. He cannot even make a statement like Fadnavis’s for fear of offending the BJP, nor like Uddhav’s for fear of being seen as having conceded too easily, nor even make a demand like Patil’s for that could endanger his alliance. 

The Shiv Sena, under its founder Bal hackeray, was born for the Marathi manoos and abandoning the Marathi manoos in Karnataka would be suicidal for anyone in either faction of the party today. The first violent riot in 1968 which defined the Shiv Sena for what it became in subsequent decades was after all over the Maharashtra-Karnataka border row and the Shiv Sena has never lost sight of the dispute in all that time, though it may have been temporarily distracted by other issues.

The border row is now tailor-made for the Shiv Sena (UBT) to hit the streets and reinforce its voter base while the NCP and Congress are similarly benefitting in south Maharashtra which was never a stronghold of either the Shiv Sena or the BJP despite the former’s sustained border campaign. But how does Shinde’s Balasahebanchi Shiv Sena hit the streets against its own government or take on its ally at the Centre or in the neighbouring state without imperilling  its own alliance and government in the state? 

Through this all Shinde is aware the dilemma is more a personal one for him rather than for his party as a whole for the rest can easily merge with the BJP, leaving him with even less grassroots support than he had done Uddhav Thackeray in July this year. 

As one observer said, “One cannot even say it is a tightrope walk for Shinde. In fact, it is not a walk at all for he is staring at only a pitfall on either side on this issue, he can go nowhere and turn to no one to bail him out.” 

According to this veteran, the BJP has Shinde at its mercy. Ultimately it will depend on their mood – whether they want to give Shinde a longer rope or pull the rug  from under his feet – that will determine his immediate  future. 

Shinde, it seems, has been hoist by his own petard for if the BJP closes all his options,  there can be no homecoming to the SS (UBT) either. He has only himself to blame for not reading the BJP as well as Uddhav had done in 2019 and which is the singular thing that ensured Uddgav's survival thus far even after the BJP pulled the plug on his party. Amply aided by Shinde.