The Shah-Pawar tango: Decoding what happened in the last one month

A win-win situation for Pawar and the BJP

Amit Shah, JNU, Shiv Sena, Pawar, Union Territory Merger, Dadra & Nagar Haveli, Daman & Diu, Administrative reform, SPG

With the luxury of hindsight, one can speculate more accurately about the backroom machinations and calculations that took place after the Maharashtra assembly election results were announced.

The moment Shiv Sena made it clear that they would settle for nothing less than having their own Chief Minister, here are the calculations that Sharad Pawar probably made:

Thereafter, he probably calculated the pros and cons of supporting a Shiv Sena Chief Minister. Here were the pros:

And here were the cons:

His other option was to support a BJP Chief Minister, namely Devendra Fadnavis. With this:

However, he would lose credibility with his base and put to rest any opportunity of consolidating the gains that he made during the assembly elections. Pawar needed to support the BJP in a manner that would keep his credibility intact, allow him to preserve his base and his options to grow.

The beauty of Amit Shah’s politics is that he probably calculated exactly what Pawar would seek if Shiv Sena insisted on having the Chief Minister’s post. 

It so happened that he found a way to accommodate it all and much more, but let us leave that aside for a moment and look at what the BJP’s objectives were. The BJP emerged from the fourth position to the pole position of Maharashtra politics in 2014 and maintained this pole position in 2019. Its objectives were two-fold since 2014, and continued to be two-fold even after the results of the assembly elections in 2019:

A month after the results, here’s what we see happening:

Additionally, the Congress has lost complete credibility with certain vote banks since they decided to support a Shiv Sena Chief Minister, and it is likely to that those vote banks will end up with NCP in the future. This is an additional bonus.

What is interesting though is that it wouldn’t have come to this at all if Shiv Sena had agreed to support Devendra Fadnavis as Chief Minister. In fact, this was the best bet for them, because:

Instead, they stand completely destroyed today. Were they misled deliberately? Was this entire situation, perhaps, engineered so that BJP and Pawar could pull off exactly what they did? Or did they simply miscalculate everything? What is clear is that they failed to clean the ‘raut’ within, ensuring a win-win situation for Pawar and the BJP.  

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