Is Modi wave still sweeping India, five months after Modi single-handedly swept his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to a decisive victory like no other BJP leader had done it ever before?
Well, it depends who you are asking this question to — a valid question after the results of assembly polls in the states of Maharashtra. While the BJP has decimated the entire opposition in Haryana and notched up a clear majority for the first time in the state, the BJP has fallen 23 short of a clear majority in the 288-seat Maharashtra assembly, which witnessed a five-horse race for the first in decades.
BJP leaders and supporters are obviously elated with these election results and party president Amit Shah has claimed that India continues to be in the grip of a Modi tsunami.
But if you ask the opposition party like the Congress, which once again got decimated at the hands of Modi and finished third in both the states thus losing even the leader of the opposition status, the election results in Maharashtra and Haryana did not signal a Modi wave or tsunami but a vote for change. Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi has argued that his party lost polls in the two states because of anti-incumbency factor as the Congress had been ruling Maharashtra for 15 years and Haryana for 10 years.
Clearly, Maharashtra is a much bigger story. Not only Maharashtra is a much bigger state as compared to Haryana — Maharashtra sends 48 MPs to the Lok Sabha as compared to 10 in the case of Haryana — but also because Maharashtra is an industrialized state and its capital Mumbai happens to be the financial capital of India.
Those who argue against a Modi wave have some merit in their argument, as the BJP’s vote share in Maharashtra was just 27.8 per cent (up from 14 per cent in 2009), which means that 72.2 per cent voters voted against the BJP. If the BJP was able to increase its number of seats to 122 from just 46 in the 2009 elections, it is largely because five major parties — Shiv Sena, Nationalist Congress Party and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena being the other three — contested the elections separately.
Maharashtra witnessed two high-profile political divorces in this election with the BJP and the Congress severing ties with the erstwhile junior partners, Shiv Sena and the NCP respectively.
Modi’s high-risk gamble of going it alone paid off quite well in the end, as it has put calls from its erstwhile 25-year-old ally Shiv Sena for rapprochement on hold. The BJP has been buoyed up further by the NCP’s prompt offer of unconditional support from outside.
Thus while Modi has not only decimated three major rivals in Maharashtra — Congress, NCP and Raj Thackeray’s MNS — it has also dealt a severe blow to the Shiv Sena, which managed to finish at the second spot with 63 seats.
Now that the BJP is playing hard to get and seems inclined to form a minority government along with smaller regional parties who have 15 seats in their kitty (which would still leave the BJP with a deficit of eight seats from a clear majority), this poses a serious existential crisis for the Shiv Sena. The extreme right regional party has been out of power for 15 years. Remaining out of power for another five years would substantially erode and dissipate the Shiv Sena.
While the tug-of-war between the erstwhile allies, the BJP and the Shiv Sena, is likely to go on till the end of this week. The Shiv Sena, with 18 MPs in the Lok Sabha, is an ally in the central government and is represented by a Cabinet-ranked minister in Modi’s council of ministers. If BJP and Shiv Sena were to formalize their political divorce at the national level too, the BJP would hardly be a sufferer and the main victim would be Shiv Sena.
Technically speaking, there is still a possibility of a non-BJP government in Maharashtra. This technically probable but practically undoable scenario can come into play if the parties finishing second, third and fourth in Maharashtra polls — Shiv Sena (63 seats), Congress (42) and NCP (41), in that order — were to get together. This can happen only if NCP, which has already pledged unconditional support from outside to the BJP, reverses its decision and decides to form government along with Shiv Sena as a senior partner with Congress supporting the Shiv Sena-NCP coalition from outside.
As per this scenario, the three parties will have a combined strength of 146, one more than the required clear majority. But this mathematic looks good only on paper and lacks sound political wisdom for various reasons. One, these three parties — Shiv Sena, Congress and NCP — are as different as chalk and cheese and have traded serious allegations one another during the bitter campaign. Two, even if assuming that the three parties, pushed to the corner by Modi for different reasons, become willing to do business together, each one of them would be digging its political grave by this mother of all opportunistic alliances.
But then there is yet another latent but powerful message from these polls. Modi has emerged as a threat not only to all opposition parties but also to allies of the BJP. Before the April-May general elections it was Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United). During the just-concluded assembly polls it was Shiv Sena in Maharashtra and Indian National Lok Dal in Haryana; BJP and INLD had together ruled Haryana in the past.
Punjab’s ruling party and BJP ally Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) may well be the next when Punjab goes to polls in 2016. Therefore, the moral of the story is: Nobody is safe from the Modi wave, be it opposition or allies.
