Why the Maharashtra tsunami is a defining political moment

Elections can have a sobering effect. The results of the 2024 Lok Sabha election in June brought the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) down to earth. Congress leaders said the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government wouldn’t last six months.The BJP’s victory in Haryana in October came as a shock to the Congress which managed to extract defeat from the jaws of victory.But Maharashtra gave the Opposition INDIA bloc renewed hope. There was infighting in the ruling three-party Mahayuti government. Hope flickered: if Maharashtra fell, the BJP’s citadel in the north and west could weaken.The BJP’s high command had, however, learnt key lessons from its 2024 Lok Sabha election reverse. It mended fences with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). RSS workers, absent in the Lok Sabha election, returned in Haryana and were out in full force on the ground in Maharashtra.The high command put Union environment minister Bhupendra Yadav in charge of the NDA’s Maharashtra assembly poll campaign. Yadav rented a flat and office in Mumbai, set up base in the city, and held daily meetings for two months with local leaders on candidate selection, caste equations and campaign strategy.Did the Ladki Bahin Yojana help the Mahayuti? The 6% surge in the turnout of women voters suggests it did. But electoral tsunamis on this scale cannot be explained by welfare schemes or development projects. There are deeper structural political factors at play. medium nocaptionhttp://youtu.be/jdPbGiFIx3U?si=-oJhDRqnklpL0OymThe Maharashtra election result is a personal setback for three INDIA bloc leaders: Sharad Pawar, Uddhav Thackeray and Rahul Gandhi. Pawar’s career is essentially over, though he has announced he will continue the fight. But the scale of defeat suffered by the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar), which won just 10 out of the 87 seats it contested, has sent a message that Pawar understands better than anyone else.It was Pawar who had convinced Uddhav to join hands with the Congress — the Shiv Sena’s sworn enemy — to form the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government in November 2019. When Sonia Gandhi and Rahul showed reluctance to ally with a “Hindutva” party, it was Pawar who told them to sacrifice ideological differences with Uddhav’s Shiv Sena for the larger objective of seizing power from the BJP in India’s wealthiest state.Uddhav’s career too has hit a wall. He is ageing and unwell. It is unlikely he will fight another election. Fortuitously for the Thackeray family, 35-year-old Aaditya Thackeray won a narrow victory over Milind Deora in Worli. He will take over the reins of a shrunken Shiv Sena (UBT).The other casualty in the Maharashtra assembly tsunami is Rahul Gandhi. The landslide defeat once again questions Rahul’s ability to take on Narendra Modi post-2024. Haryana could be passed off as a blip. But Maharashtra signals the BJP’s strong revival after the Lok Sabha reverse five months ago as well as the Congress’s stagnation.Rahul’s strategic errorBy seeming to align with the anti-India narrative of the “deep state” in the US, Rahul has made a strategic error. He should have learnt from grandmother Indira Gandhi that nothing unites Indians more than the perceived machinations of the “foreign hand”.Mrs Gandhi used the threat of foreign powers destabilising India to rally voters. Rahul has done the exact opposite by targeting an individual industrialist whom Western agencies have long had in their crosshairs.The other tactical mistake Rahul made was opposing Waqf Board reforms. With even Christian organisations, including churches in Kerala and Karnataka, protesting against the Waqf Board seizing their land, the Congress-led Opposition could lose a key Christian vote bank while helping consolidate the Hindu vote behind the BJP-led NDA.The larger impact of the Maharashtra election debacle on the Congress is its loss of influence among other INDIA bloc leaders. The sniping has begun with the Trinamool Congress (TMC) asking Rahul why the Congress couldn’t stop the BJP in Maharashtra when the TMC won all six West Bengal seats in bypolls held concurrently with the assembly elections in Maharashtra and Jharkhand. medium nocaptionhttp://youtu.be/xJ818VYUhPw?si=tDfiNdTBjGzB0BHRThe victory of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM)-led alliance in the assembly election is of little comfort to the Congress. It was a win for chief minister Hemant Soren and his tribal vote bank. Besides, even in Jharkhand, the BJP individually won more seats (22) than the Congress (16).The disquieting truth is that the Congress wins in states where it is in alliance with a strong regional party: Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) in Tamil Nadu, JMM in Jharkhand and National Conference (NC) in Jammu and Kashmir.The Congress now governs on its own only two large southern states (Telangana and Karnataka) and one small northern state (Himachal Pradesh). That is not a happy augury for a party seeking to lead a national INDIA front against the BJP-led NDA.The INDIA bloc will also worry about Uttar Pradesh. In assembly bypolls for nine UP seats, the BJP and its ally Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) won seven, including two Muslim-dominated seats, restricting the Samajwadi Party (SP) to just two seats. This has strengthened chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s hand ahead of the crucial 2027 assembly election.Internal sabotage had cut Adityanath down to size in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. The BJP’s tally in the key state plunged from 62 seats in 2019 to 33 seats in 2024.That folly has been exposed. The Maharashtra tsunami and the 7/9 UP bypoll sweep are a defining political moment with long-term consequences.Read more from the author here.