Reality check for BJP in Maharashtra after MVA’s big win

It was a wave in Maharashtra, but not the kind the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was expecting. The saffron party, which was talking of bagging more than 45 seats in the state, managed to get a lead in only 17 seats with the help of its allies- -the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party (Ajit Pawar).

The results are a dramatic turn for the BJP which on its own had been getting 20-plus seats in the last two polls. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP had bagged 23 seats. This time, it had to be content with just 10, though counting remaining in a few seats.

The Maharashtra battle saw a tight contest in many seats, with the count going to the wire in several of them. The manner in which the BJP has faced a drubbing in the polls has caused jitters in the saffron camp, as Assembly polls are just a few months away.

Of all the major parties, the BJP had the worst strike rate, as it could win in only 10 of the 28 seats in which it had contested. The Shiv Sena contested in 15 but led in seven, whereas the Nationalist Congress Party faction led by Ajit Pawar, which contested in four seats, won only one.

Ajit Pawar’s wife Sunetra Pawar lost a high-profile battle against Supriya Sule in Baramati by a margin of more than 1 lakh votes.

There was a huge wave of anti-incumbency against the BJP and it showed in the results. The Congress, which had won just one seat in the state in the last elections, got 13 of the 15 in which it contested.

The Nationalist Congress Party Sharadchandra Pawar got seven from the 10 it contested and the Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray faction got nine seats out of the 21 it contested.

What makes the performance of the opposition parties creditable is that two of the opposition parties--the Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party- -had a vertical split, and besides losing leaders, the two parties even lost their traditional election symbol on which they have been contesting.

The Congress performed exceedingly well in the state. While in the earlier elections, the Congress had faltered in a direct one-on-one fight with the BJP, this time it did well. A sample of how well the Congress did can be gauged from the Sangli Lok Sabha constituency, where a Congress rebel candidate, Vishal, backed by the local unit of the Congress, managed to defeat BJP parliamentarian Sanjay Kaka Patil.

The contest in Maharashtra also saw close contests for several seats where candidates of the ruling party went up by a few hundred votes only to go down in the next round of counting.

There was high drama, too. For instance, in Mumbai North West, UBT’s Amol Kirtikar emerged winner by 600 votes, but Shiv Sena’s Ravindra Waikar challenged it. In the recount, Waikar won by 48 votes. The BJP suffered setbacks in every region in the state--from Vidarbha to Marathwada to Western Maharashtra to even Mumbai.

The BJP got nearly wiped out from Vidarbha, as it could win only two of the 10 seats. The seat it managed to win was the Nagpur seat of Nitin Gadkari, and one from Akola, where Anup Dhotre managed to stave off a challenge from Congress candidate Abhay Patil. In the region, out of 10 seats, Congress won five, BJP won two, and Shiv Sena and the NCP-SP got one each.

In Marathwada, too, the wave against the BJP was so strong that Rao Saheb Danve, a Union minister and five-term parliamentarian from Jalna who had been winning by a margin of 2-3 lakh votes in the last few elections, lost to Congress candidate Kalyan Kale.

In Mumbai, in the six seats that the BJP and Congress had won in 2014 and in 2019, the results were almost reversed. BJP’s Piyush Goyal won the Mumbai North seat. The party lost the Mumbai North East seat to Shiv Sena’s Sanjay Dina Patil, and also the Mumbai North Central seat to Congress’ Varsha Gaikwad. The Shiv Sena had contested in three seats, but managed to win just one out of the the three.

The results are a shocker not just for the BJP but also for Ajit Pawar, who split the Nationalist Congress Party and joined hands with the BJP and Shiv sena in the government.