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:
- The BJP will never agree to replace Fadnavis, let alone backing a non-BJP Chief Minister.
- Hence, if a Shiv Sena Chief Minister were to become a reality, NCP and Congress would have to be part of the government.
- The Congress would probably support any non-BJP Chief Minister if it had a chance because the longer they stay out of power, the more their influence and resources deplete.
- Therefore, whether a Shiv Sena Chief Minister was to become a reality or not, was a decision that was completely left to him
Thereafter, he probably calculated the pros and cons of supporting a Shiv Sena Chief Minister. Here were the pros:
- He would be part of the government in Maharashtra.
- The trend of depleting influences and resources by staying out of power could be reversed.
- He would consolidate the gains that he made during the assembly elections.
And here were the cons:
- He would be going against the mandate.
- The central agencies would come after him with fury and vengeance.
- His base would be unimpressed with his support for a Shiv Sena Chief Minister.
- The government would not last for long. Even if it survived the ideological conflicts, could it survive the BJP? Even if he kept his flock together, would Uddhav and the Congress manage to keep theirs together?
His other option was to support a BJP Chief Minister, namely Devendra Fadnavis. With this:
- He would be part of the government in Maharashtra.
- The trend of depleting influences and resources by staying out of power could be reversed.
- The central agencies would probably go easy on him.
- He would be going with the mandate.
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:
- Being in pole position was not enough, they had to be as strong a force in Maharashtra as they were in states like Gujarat.
- For that to happen Shiv Sena had to be squeezed to its annihilation so that the BJP alone could occupy the conservative/Hindu/right-wing space in Maharashtra politics.
A month after the results, here’s what we see happening:
- The mandate has been respected.
- Devendra Fadnavis is back as Chief Minister.
- Shiv Sena’s conservative/Hindu/right-wing base is lost, and will ultimately end up with the BJP.
- Pawar is part of the government.
- Pawar doesn’t lose credibility because he has personally distanced himself from it.
- Pawar also doesn’t lose credibility because he took a month to do this, and a lot of water flowed under the bridge in that one month.
- The central agencies will probably go slow on him.
- By distancing himself from it, he keeps his base with him.
- He has a victim card too now, which allows him to grow his base.
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:
- The mandate would have been respected.
- They would have preserved their conservative/Hindu/right-wing base.
- They would have been part of the government.
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.