The issue of political defection usually takes centre-stage at a particular moment in the life of a polity. It is an intermediate period of transition when an old system of political dominance gives rise to a new one.
In Maharashtra, the era of Congress dominance, which had weakened by the 1990s, ended in 2014. Nevertheless, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Congress–Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) alliance led to a chaotic decade, given the attitude of the local elite in areas such as western Maharashtra. whether Dramatic change in Ajit Pawar NCP faction Whether this signals the beginning of a new era of BJP dominance for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) or is just a fluke truce remains to be seen.
state-level focus
The BJP’s single majority at the national level since 2014 has fueled its desire for state-level dominance in several states. The success of these various state campaigns is largely based on large-scale defections from the erstwhile ruling and/or primary opposition parties. The volatile politics of the northeastern states, dependent on central aid, quickly yielded to this trend.
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The BJP became the ruling party in Assam in 2016 following the defection of key leaders of the Asom Gana Parishad and the ruling Congress. This was a model of rapid party expansion, particularly based on defection of dominant caste/class leaders, which was later used in Tripura and the wider Northeast. In Arunachal Pradesh, in 2016, almost the entire state unit of the Congress – 44 out of 45 MLAs, including Chief Minister Pema Khandu – crossed over to the NDA ally overnight, and soon thereafter joined the BJP.
Thus, now the NCP split in Maharashtra can be better understood in the context of national politics. Such a move enables us to move beyond the immediate level of contingent factors such as leadership succession and coercive intervention of central agencies. It would also help explain the split (within a whirlwind year) of the NCP and Shiv Sena in the context of the emerging structural dynamics of Maharashtra politics.
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The national context is particularly important because the politics of Maharashtra, like the politics of Assam, is deeply intertwined with the slow-moving ground of national politics. This has given the state its distinctive political stability, supported by the hegemony of the dominant farming caste of the Maratha-Kunbi, and bolstered by the support of a largely sympathetic centre. Political scientist Suhas Palshikar has suggested that the traditional “Congress system”, the model of informal adjustment of diverse constituencies within the party, has probably survived longest in Maharashtra.
Until 2014, the Congress party (or factions that broke away from the Congress) ruled the state for almost the entire period after independence. The Rajya Mandal remained largely unaffected by the ideological challenge of the Revolution, which reshaped the political structure of northern India. The only significant exception was the three-year period between 1995–1998 when the NDA coalition (Shiv Sena and BJP) took control of the state. This short-lived, fruitless change in state politics also coincided, unexpectedly, with a bleak period of national transformation marked by the coming to power of the NDA coalition at the national level.
Political economy of Maharashtra as a factor
The reason why national and state politics go hand in hand in Maharashtra is largely related to its political economy. The state has not developed a regional business elite like Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh or Gujarat. Instead, the impressive heights of the economy are still controlled by a pan-India business elite.
Journalist Harish Damodaran, in his book, India’s New Capitalists: Caste, Business and Industry in a Modern Nation (2008), draws a distinction between Patels and Marathas, the dominant agricultural castes in Gujarat and Maharashtra, respectively. The trajectory of their upward mobility. While the Patels have moved from agricultural cooperatives to modern urban sectors such as finance and petrochemicals over the past three decades, the Marathas have lagged behind. Therefore, NCP and Shiv Sena have rejected a clear regionalist agenda. Instead, regional parties attempt to co-opt the national business elite, and aspire to a share of power at the national level in order to transfer state resources to rural cooperatives and allied sectors in the form of patronage.
Therefore, Ajit PawarIn his (so far one-sided) battle with his uncle Sharad Pawar for control of the NCP, political history as well as age is on his side. One can see in Junior Pawar’s coup a repeat of 1978 or 1999, when Sharad Pawar formed a separate Congress during its tenure in the political wilderness at the national level. More precisely, Ajit Pawar’s decision to join hands with the Narendra Modi-led BJP echoes Sharad Pawar’s move in 1986 to merge his Congress (S) with the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress (I). Much like the NCP, like the Congress (S) is the largest opposition party in the state, this is a calculated move. Moreover, in both the cases, the shrewd Pawars handed over their political future to the dominant ruling party, which also had a thumping majority at the central level. In fact, it was the voluntary leave of opposition space that allowed the Shiv Sena to expand into rural Maharashtra and channelize discontent against an established establishment. Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena grew from one seat in the 1980s to 52 seats in the 1990s and emerged as the principal opposition party.
The NCP’s sociological base, like that of the Congress(S) at that time, acts as a powerful constraint on the party. In 1977, scholar Donald Rosenthal wrote of an “extended elite” of Marathas in western Maharashtra who were gaining political control from colonizing state policies in the areas of agricultural investment, education, and rural self-government. The NCP’s political support is still rooted in this rural economic base, which united the Maratha elite into political networks and then linked them to a large voter-base, even though the urban economic landscape has changed over the past five decades. As Damodaran writes, the sugar cooperatives of Maharashtra are ‘self-governing republics headed by powerful chieftains’ who follow dynastic lineages to permanently establish themselves in local politics. It is a decentralized federation, not a command-and-control structure.
organizational strengths
The informal organizational base of the NCP is one of the major reasons why the party has drifted into the NDA camp, while in comparison, the Shiv Sena has proved to be more flexible. Political scientist Chibber and others. (2014) coded the organizational strength of various parties into three categories: weakly organized; Moderately organized and strongly organized parties. Relevant parameters are formal organizational structures that govern upward mobility, engagement with the worker base, and political mobilization between elections. According to his calculations, the Shiv Sena had shifted during its life cycle from a party that was a strongly organized party to a moderately organized party. In contrast, the NCP (in 1999 and 2004) has been coded as a weakly organized party.
Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena has largely retained its organizational base in large urban areas like Mumbai, Nashik and Pune. The party has a hierarchical system of control linking a large worker base with affiliated bodies of urban workers and numerous party branches to the charismatic personality of the Supreme Leader. Thackeray not only closely controls appointments and decision-making, but also creates a populist-emotional appeal among the party’s base. Consider the limited number of municipal corporators who shifted to the Eknath Shinde Sena during the past year and the massive defection of NCP corporators to the Ajit Pawar camp.
As political scientist Herbert Kitschelt has written among others, political parties are a set of power-seekers held together by a range of incentives. Local elites across Maharashtra are faced with the difficult task of rethinking and rearranging these incentives. Of course, the defection of several local party bosses in the past year has weakened the Thackeray army in the rural areas as well. Yet, it is Sharad Pawar’s ideologically non-descriptive NCP, whose politics remained confined to efficient management of political networks, that is facing a more serious existential crisis.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist