Number Theory: The political black box that is Maharashtra

In the 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Maharashtra was a big contributor to the seat tally of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance at the Centre.

With 48 Lok Sabha MPs, Maharashtra is the second largest state in terms of political representation in India. On paper, the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) now has a coalition with two largest regional parties in the state, namely, the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). Yet politics in the state seems far from settled and the churn continues. What explains this uncertainty? Here are four charts that try and answer this question.

Lok Sabha. (AP Photo)

The political black box that is Maharashtra

• 
  How important is Maharashtra for the BJP’s national ambition?

  In 2014 and 2019 Lok Sabha elections, it was a big contributor to the seat tally of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA). In 2014, the NDA won 42 seats from the state, with the BJP and Shiv Sena accounting for 23 and 18 out of those respectively and Swabhimani Paksha winning 1 seat. The BJP and Shiv Sena repeated their tally in the state in the 2019 parliamentary elections as well, with the alliance winning 41 seats. This makes Maharashtra the biggest contributor to NDA’s tally after Uttar Pradesh.
• 
  BJP has tried but it cannot win the state alone

  The biggest proof of this came in the 2014 assembly elections which were held months after the Lok Sabha polls. Both the NCP and the Shiv Sena contested on their own in these elections rather than allying with their traditional alliance partners, the Congress and the BJP. While the BJP did finish as the single largest party with 122 MLAs, it fell short of the half-way mark of 145 in the assembly and had to get into a post-poll alliance with the Shiv Sena to form a government. For the Congress, the situation was even more difficult as it was reduced to just 42 MLAs in the assembly, just one ahead of the NCP. 2014 was the not the first election in Maharashtra which destroyed any one party’s ambition to rule the state. No single party has managed to win a majority of its own in the state since 1990. This is what makes the support of either NCP or Shiv Sena crucial in Maharashtra’s politics.
• 
  This is what made the MVA a big worry for the BJP

  The 2019 Maharashtra Assembly election was primarily fought between the alliance of BJP-Shiv Sena and Congress-NCP. However, after the declaration of results, the alliance between Uddhav Thackeray-led-Shiv Sena and the BJP broke down, with the Sena demanding its own chief minister rather than the BJP which was the senior partner in the alliance. What followed was a grand coalition of Congress-NCP-Shiv Sena, called Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) which formed the government with Thackeray as the Chief Minister. Data from 2014 assembly elections shows that Congress together with undivided Shiv Sena and NCP would have electorally been a formidable force. If the votes received by the three parties in 2014 were added up in each constituency, the Congress-NCP-Shiv Sena alliance would have won a total of 218 seats, way past the majority mark. Meanwhile, the BJP would have lost 60 seats it won originally from its tally.
• 
  But the MVA was anything but a natural alliance

  To be sure, the Congress and NCP are not natural alliance partners of Shiv Sena, considering the latter’s stark difference in ideology. In fact, Shiv Sena have historically been anti-Congress until it broke its alliance with the BJP and formed the MVA. These ideological splits can also be seen in their performance in 2014 assembly election, when all the four parties contested elections on their own. The largest number of wins for each of them came against their ideological rivals, i.e. both Shiv Sena and BJP individually won most number of seats against Congress and NCP and vice versa. For example, out of the 41 seats that NCP won in 2014, 29 came against Shiv Sena (19) and the BJP (10). In the case of Shiv Sena, out of the 63 seats it won, as many as 34 came against its ideological rivals Congress (16) and NCP (18). The same trend could be seen for both Congress and the BJP as well.
• What next?

  Having dislodged the MVA from power with majority (and now officially recognized) factions of the NCP and the Shiv Sena behind it, the BJP would be hoping to enjoy a formidable alliance for its 2024 Lok Sabha and assembly battle. What remains to be seen is whether the official groups will enjoy the popularity they had or will it still rest with the founders of these two parties, namely the Thackerays and Sharad Pawar. Had elections to local bodies been conducted in the state, answering this question would have been easier. Given the fact that that a BJP controlled state government has been delaying these elections, Maharashtra will continue to be a black box until the Lok Sabha elections and perhaps even after that.