Maharashtra polls: all fronts and no back

Whatever the failings of Maharashtra’s political class, and these are many, a lack of optimism is not among them. Even after the last date for the withdrawal of nominations to the Assembly elections, there are more fronts, real and imagined, alive and still in the making. More candidates, lots more spending. And a rebel-to-candidate ratio that can only be described as entertaining. The chaos and confusion are bewildering. A senior Shiv Sena figure, discarded by his party, contests the election as a Congress candidate. His nephew leaves the Sena to join the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena of Raj Thackeray. And that’s one of the easier moves to follow.

Yet, the key question in the race to control Maharashtra’s 288-seat legislature boils down to: who will the fragmentation benefit? Will the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party gain from a multiplicity of fronts which could dissipate the anti-Congress vote? Or will the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party benefit from the Third Front’s cutting into the Congress-NCP vote? That is the million-dollar question. (And millions of dollars — or rupee equivalents — are being spent by parties to get the answer they like). Given the number of known faces in the fray for every seat, and the complexity of alliance and other factors, that answer might differ in each constituency.

The Lok Sabha elections of April-May were a lot closer in this State than many might believe. The difference between the Congress-NCP and the Sena-BJP fronts was narrower than it appears at first glance. The former may have won 25 Lok Sabha seats and the latter only 20, but in terms of Assembly segments, the Congress-NCP combine led its saffron rivals by less than a dozen. Then too, there were others in the fray — which did make a significant, even decisive, difference to the poll outcome.

The MNS, for instance, torpedoed the Sena-BJP in the Mumbai-Thane region. The MNS did not win a single Lok Sabha seat and led in very few segments, but the lakhs of votes it gathered in those was enough to hand the Congress-NCP victory in a State where they had assiduously pursued defeat. To this day, in the present round, the Congress strategy is mostly based on one assumption. That the MNS will fare even better in a State-level election where regional issues dominate. In short, a Congress-NCP win is predicated on how well the MNS does.

There is not much else the Congress-NCP can count on. Massive job losses, a crippling price rise and abysmal governance are not the best platform to reach out to the voters on. The cheery confidence of the Congress, though, springs from the May Lok Sabha polls. In those, it lost four per cent in vote share compared to 2004 but gained four seats thanks to the MNS sinking the Sena. The Congress-NCP government’s record is easily among the worst in the country. It’s hard to find a single poll promise it actually fulfilled. Popular perception doesn’t worry the parties much, though. In the Congress view, the math should do the trick this time, too. More so when the Opposition has failed to exploit major issues and discontent to put the ruling combine on the mat.

Courtesy:beat.thehindu.com

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