Maharashtra Polls: The Game is On

Maharashtra Polls: Inside the High-Stakes Battle of Strategy and Influence

Chair of the Congress party's media and publicity wing Pawan Khera posted on Twitter that the party's internal surveys indicate that the Maha Vikas Aghadi will win between 165-170 seats in the upcoming Maharashtra polls on November 20.

Fair enough -- various surveys by the three members of the coalition have uniformly suggested upwards of 150 seats for the MVA, against the 145 seats required to get a simple majority. And the BJP’s internal surveys have also indicated that the coalition it leads is likely to end up on the losing side.

But then, in the Haryana elections held earlier this year too, internal surveys and all pollsters were unanimous that the Congress would win a comfortable majority -- and look how that turned out.

On the same day that Khera made his statement, I noticed a blue

Maharashtra Polls: Inside the High-Stakes Battle of Strategy and Influence

Chair of the Congress party's media and publicity wing Pawan Khera posted on Twitter that the party's internal surveys indicate that the Maha Vikas Aghadi will win between 165-170 seats in the upcoming Maharashtra polls on November 20.

Fair enough -- various surveys by the three members of the coalition have uniformly suggested upwards of 150 seats for the MVA, against the 145 seats required to get a simple majority. And the BJP’s internal surveys have also indicated that the coalition it leads is likely to end up on the losing side.

But then, in the Haryana elections held earlier this year too, internal surveys and all pollsters were unanimous that the Congress would win a comfortable majority -- and look how that turned out.

On the same day that Khera made his statement, I noticed a blue-tick Congress supporter posting a snarky comment on Twitter about the lack of crowds at an Amit Shah rally in the state -- and therein lies the issue. Neither in Haryana earlier, nor in Maharashtra now, has the Congress caught on to a quantum shift in the BJP's campaign strategy.

The old model of blitzing a poll-bound state with rallies by an array of star campaigners led by Prime Minister Modi, and trucking in large paid crowds to show strength, has been shelved -- and a large part of the reason is the BJP's realisation that a Modi-led campaign is no longer the silver bullet that ensures electoral gains.

That model has now been replaced by a ground game made up of multiple elements -- and the most notable is the fielding of "independent" candidates funded by the BJP. Such “independents” proliferate in those constituencies where the race is expected to be tight, based on voting numbers from the Lok Sabha elections earlier this year, and the idea is to bleed votes from the MVA.

A second, and related, ploy is the fielding of candidates bearing names identical to those of official MVA candidates. This is one example of dozens: in the Tasgaon-Kavathe Mahakal constituency, Sharad Pawar's faction of the Nationalist Congress Party has fielded Rohit Raosaheb Patil, son of former home minister the late R R Patil. The official opponent is Sanjay Kaka Patil of the Ajit Pawar faction of the NCP — but also in the field are Rohit Ravsaheb Patil, Rohit Rajgonda Patil, and Rohit Rajendra Patil -- all independents with names suspiciously close to that of the senior Pawar’s candidate. The idea is to confuse the voters and, according to backstage whispers, these independents are being funded out of the BJP’s immense war chest.

Maharashtra Polls: It's Game On

The BJP also managed to rope in Raj Thackeray and his Maharashtra Navnirman Sena -- not because the fringe party led by Uddhav’s cousin has serious skin in the game, but because the MNS can split votes in several constituencies particularly in Mumbai (which alone has 36 seats) and Pune.

Alongside these and other activities of Amit Shah's dirty tricks department, the BJP is relying heavily on the backing of the RSS, which alone has the cadre to match the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena. This time, the RSS is solidly behind the BJP-led Mahayuti alliance, for two reasons: one, the RSS is aware that helping the BJP-led alliance to a win in Maharashtra puts the hindutva outfit in a good bargaining position to press for a laundry list of demands it has been keeping in its back pocket and two, the RSS is equally aware of the benefits that can accrue from the BJP controlling India's most cash-rich state.

The political battle between the Maha Vikas Aghadi and the Mahayuti is counterpointed by a battle of big business playing out in the background. Word is that the Ambanis have been making nice with Uddhav Thackeray and have gotten his assurance that in the event the MVA wins, Thackeray will pull the plug on the Dharavi Redevelopment Project. Meanwhile, Gautam Adani is flat-out backing the Mahayuti largely to safeguard his stake in the Dharavi scheme. While on that, check out this Sreenivasan Jain interview with Ajit Pawar where, among other things, Pawar talks of how Adani joined hands with Amit Shah to engineer the split within the NCP.

The MVA looks rock solid on the surface. The alliance survived the seat-sharing talks without any of the three parties suffering serious wounds; the question of who will be chief minister is also settled with Pawar’s NCP and the Congress agreeing to Uddhav Thackeray taking the top job.

But the big ‘if’ that can determine the MVA’s fortunes is how well the votes of one party translate to the other two — and this depends on all three parties campaigning as one as they did during the Lok Sabha polls. As on date, that is not happening to any noticeable degree.

It is not that the Mahayuti alliance is free of faultlines. Tensions between Devendra Fadnavis, Eknath Shinde and Ajit Pawar persist, and this is largely responsible for the Mahayuti alliance going into the polls without an identified chief ministerial candidate.

Amit Shah and the central leadership have put such issues on the back burner, to be sorted out once the results come in on 23 November. For now, each regional satrap has been given specific areas to focus on, with an emphasis on the ground game and on putting in place the machinery to get out the vote.

With due respect to Khera and his party pollsters, the upcoming Maharashtra polls is nowhere close to a done deal -- and this is without accounting for voter suppression and the inevitable EVM manipulations (which, no matter how strenuously the ECI denies it, is very much a thing, but more on that later).

This article first appeared on Prem Panicker's Substack. Here is the original link to the source. To follow Prem Panicker on Substack, click here.