Mumbai Civic Polls—Shiv Sena has the upper hand, for now

The Shiv Sena has perfected the art of having its cake and eating it too. It has caught the Bharatiya Janata Party between a rock and a very hard place.

Its alliance with the BJP for the civic polls in Maharashtra’s big cities in February is clearly off. Party president Uddhav Thackeray has been the most critical yet of the BJP of any Sena leader so far. He has stated that his party has lost half its life—25 of the 50 years of its existence—in alliance with the BJP whose hidden aim, he said, was only to decimate the party in Maharashtra while giving it no space in any other part of the country. And now it is encroaching on the Shiv Sena’s space in Mumbai.

According to Uddhav, the Shiv Sena did not ally with the BJP in the 1980s for power but for Hindutva. Yet the BJP was unwilling to cede it even one or two seats in states like Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat over the decades, while now it is trying to step on the Sena’s toes by muscling its way into the civic space in Mumbai, which has most certainly belonged to the Shiv Sena for nearly a quarter century.

The Shiv Sena had won the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) elections all on its own in 1985. That was when BJP leader late Pramod Mahajan realised the importance of the Shiv Sena. The Sena’s arrangement with Mahajan was that the BJP would leave the state by and large to its ally, which would in turn curtail its national ambitions so as not to damage the BJP’s prospects.

The arrangement worked well in the lifetimes of both Mahajan and Sena founder, the late Bal Thackeray. However, even before their passing, the younger generation in the BJP, particularly Nitin Gadkari and the late Gopinath Munde, were chafing at the fact that their party could not grow in Maharashtra with the Shiv Sena playing Big Brother in the state. After Mahajan and Munde’s passing and the side-lining of senior BJP leader LK Advani, who was committed to the alliance, there is really nothing to hold the two parties together. Had the BJP won a majority of its own in the Maharashtra assembly in 2014, it would most certainly have written the final epitaph of its partnership with the Shiv Sena. However, Uddhav Thackeray then had surprised all critics by winning a substantial number of seats, necessitating the BJP to ally with the party again within days of breaking off its alliance. But there has been no love lost between the younger generation of leaders ever since.

The Sena has tried to emerge as the true opposition to the BJP in Maharashtra, despite being its ally in government. The BJP has had no option but to grin and bear it for the only other way out is to ally with Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party. However, the Union government’s awarding the Padma Vibhushan to Pawar has damaged much of Narendra Modi’s claim of commitment to clean governance. Modi had once described the NCP as a "Naturally Corrupt Party’. Now, say critics, the BJP might have no qualms about accommodating the corrupt to serve its own interests.

ELECTORAL CALCULATIONS BEHIND SENA’S MOVE

Uddhav Thackeray’s calling off the alliance is also because, as voting for BMC polls on February 21 draws closer, he is more certain of a victory in the civic polls. Uddhav realises that much of the BJP’s core voter base in the city is shifting to his party and that is why the BJP was desperate for an alliance—to stem the bleeding and leave the voters with little choice.

The BJP’s insistence on 114 of the 228 seats in the BMC is based on the 2014 assembly election results, wherein it won half the seats in Mumbai. However, then there was a sharp Gujarati-Marathi divide with most of the former voting for Modi, if not for the BJP.

Says Rajeev Panday, spokesperson of the Mumbai BJP, "It is not as though no Maharashtrian will vote for us. Our CM is Maharashtrian, so is our Mumbai president. Every last Maharashtrian vote does not belong to the Shiv Sena.’’ That might well be true, but the flip side is that most of the Gujarati vote in the city now does not belong to the BJP either. According to Raju Parulekar, senior writer and Shiv Sena observer, “There is huge anger among the Gujaratis and traders in Mumbai after Modi’s demonetisation policy. Two communities have been most badly affected—Gujaratis who are the rich traders and North Indians who are the poor labourers and self-employed small workers who found themselves out of jobs after demonetisation.’’

That anger will now manifest itself in the BMC polls, says Parulekar, saying it is obvious that the drive did not cede any black money or even curb terrorism or fake currency, which were the stated purposes of demonetisation. And that mood has been amply conveyed to Uddhav Thackeray, who feels confident enough to cock a snook at the BJP and reassert the Shiv Sena’s importance.

STAKES HIGH for both SHIV SENA and BJP

There is no question, though, that the upcoming BMC polls is a do-or-die battle for the Shiv Sena. Were it to lose, the BJP and the NCP, which has been losing much of its regional space to the Sena, could gang up to drive the last nail in the Sena coffin. The BJP will lose face but will survive for some time. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, though, will have to bear the brunt of a poor show at the BMC elections, as the final decision had been left to him and Uddhav. Fadnavis is comforting himself with the thought, rather publicly stated, "If there had not been a break up between us during the assembly polls, I might not have become chief minister because the Sena would have given us only 127 seats to contest.’’

The BJP even then was demanding half the assembly seats—144 out of 288. It won 121 and fell short by 43 seats. The Sena won 63 and had made up the difference. Fadnavis’ hope is that his party might pull off a similar victory in the BMC. However, this space has always belonged to the Shiv Sena and with even the North Indian vote swinging away from the party, the BJP has much to lose—and not just the BMC. The Sena has the BJP in a pincer hold—the latter has to keep the Sena in government to prevent being at the mercy of the NCP, which is then sure to take over the government as it had done with the Congress. Sanjay Raut, Sena MP and editor of the party mouthpiece Saamna, has already said it will keep its alliance both at the Centre and the state, so as not to destabilise the government and not cause damage to Maharashtra. The hypocritical magnanimity of that statement has set Fadnavis’s teeth on edge, who has shot back, "There is a huge gap between the Sena’s aachar (conduct) and vichaar (thought).’’

But the BJP has other risks—the Sena has also dropped hints that it may once again vote against the NDA’s candidate in the elections for India’s President in July this year. The biggest hint was Uddhav Thackeray’s statement that the Sena would never again ally with the BJP. The Shiv Sena had supported the UPA candidates Pratibha Patil and Pranab Mukherjee in the last two elections, first because Patil was Maharashtrian and the Sena could not have damaged its Marathi ethos by voting against her. They voted for Mukherjee because they believed he was a better parliamentarian than the NDA candidate, late PA Sangma. This time, however, it will be a moral blow to the BJP if the Sena were to vote against its own candidate. That will clearly jeopardise its 2019 bids for the Lok Sabha and the Maharashtra assembly.

In many ways then, this civic poll is crucial to the futures of both parties. A defeat for either could lead to an existentialist crisis sooner or later. But for now the lion has been bested. The smile is clearly on the face of the tiger.