On October 4, when BJP’s Ghatkopar candidate Parag Shah was on his way to file his nomination, supporters of Maharashtra’s former minister Prakash Mehta allegedly attacked him. Mehta was hopeful that he would retain his candidature from the eastern Mumbai constituency, where he had been elected in 2014. The party’s decision to find an alternative to the sitting MLA has upset Mehta’s supporters, who have vowed to campaign against Shah in the constituency. Mehta’s name had come up in a controversy about impropriety in a slum redevelopment project.
In Navi Mumbai, more than 200 Shiv Sena karyakartas resigned from the party after the Belapur and Airoli seats went into BJP’s kitty. These were considered to be the ‘big compromise’ made by the Sena when it came to seat-sharing. In Pune, where all eight seats went to BJP and Sena workers have en masse decided to campaign against the BJP candidates.
Sena had demanded an equal share of the 288 seats but had to settle with 124. This has left several hopeful candidates agitated.
Both the BJP and the Sena are now facing problems with their cadre and their second rung of leadership. In the past few months, both BJP and Sena have been on a poaching spree, luring several senior Congress, Nationalist Congress Party, and other regional party leaders to hop on to their side. Most of them are senior leaders and have clout in their respective regions.
Both BJP and Sena had had to consider them at the time of seat-sharing — their clout comes from their winnability. At least nine of these newly inducted leaders from Congress and NCP will be contesting on a BJP ticket. But this arrangement has left their own leaders unhappy.
Also read: In a First for Thackeray Family, Aaditya to Contest Maharashtra Assembly Elections
Among the prominent defectors in the BJP list are Harshvardhan Patil (Indapur), Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil (Shirdi), Vaibhav Pichad (Akole), Jaykumar Gore (Man), Madan Bhosale (Wai), Rana Jagjitsinh Patil (Tuljapur), Kalidas Kolambkar (Wadala), Shivendraraje Bhosale (Satara), and Sandeep Naik (Airoli).
In a bid to make space for newly inducted leaders, as many as 12 MLAs have been denied tickets.
The decision by the BJP to drop some existing big names from its list has also caused problems. Some veteran leaders like Eknath Khadse, Vinod Tawade, Chandrasekhar Bawankule, and Raj Purohit have been denied tickets — Khadse immediately declared he would stand as an Independent.
The party, however, decided to placate Khadse by fielding his daughter Rohini from Muktainagar constituency in north Maharashtra. Khadse has represented this seat since 1991, but after his name emerged in a corruption case in 2016, he had to resign and has been in the wilderness since then.
In November, last year, the ruling BJP decided to introduce a reservation bill for the Marathas, a politically powerful community in the state. This gesture changed the political face of BJP in the state which has mostly remained a ‘shetji-bhatji’ i.e. a Brahmin-Baniya-ruled party. Now the party has followed up by giving tickets to more than 50 leaders from the Maratha caste.
“This was a conscious effort. Our move to introduce reservations for the community has brought the community closer to the party. We only decided to acknowledge it by giving them appropriate representation in the party,” said a senior BJP leader.
Also read: The Maratha Reservation Conundrum Will Open a Pandora’s Box. Here’s Why
He further added that the representation of OBC candidates have increased too in the party. This move, experts say, is also taken to break the NCP’s back in the state. The NCP is almost solely run on the power and influence of the Maratha community.
Crisis in Congress
While the BJP had a peculiar problem of surplus candidates, Congress and NCP have been seen struggling to find the appropriate candidates to pose a challenge to the ruling BJP-Sena in most constituencies. The Congress had to also increase its number of candidates for the election as talks to contest the polls with smaller parties have all failed. The party had originally planned to field 125 candidates but has finally come up with a list of 155.
The once ruling party’s performance has deteriorated over the years. In 2014, the party had managed to secure only 42 seats, against 82 and 69 in 2009 and 2004 respectively. In 2019, Lok Sabha elections, it was decimated to a mere five seats in the state.
The crisis in the party has further deepened with several prominent faces quitting it just ahead of elections. Urmila Matondkar, who had joined at the eve of the Lok Sabha elections, recently quit the party accusing it of not taking her complaints against another party man, Sanjay Nirupam, seriously. A few days later, Nirupam took to social media to announce that he would be keeping away in the poll campaign.
It seems Congress Party doesn’t want my services anymore. I had recommended just one name in Mumbai for Assembly election. Heard that even that has been rejected.
As I had told the leadership earlier,in that case I will not participate in poll campaign.
Its my final decision.— Sanjay Nirupam (@sanjaynirupam) October 3, 2019
The Congress-NCP alliance too has been chaotic with both parties asking for more seats than the other. Earlier both parties had jointly announced that they would each contest 125 seats leaving 38 for smaller allies. However, Congress ended up declaring candidates for 147 seats in all, assuming the big brother status in the alliance.
Due to this last-minute chaos, both parties have ended up fielding their own candidate in Aheri constituency in the Gadchiroli district. While the congress has nominated former MLA Deepak Atram from Aheri, former state minister Dharmarao Baba Atram has been fielded as a NCP candidate from the constituency.
‘Representation’
The newly floated Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi has identified candidates from several smaller and bigger Bahujan groups. Keeping in line with the popular discourse on around the unity of the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Other Backward Classes and other religious minorities, almost all candidates have been chosen from the marginalised communities.
Also read: ‘Targeting of Leaders Is Shaking Parliamentary Democracy’: Opposition
Along with the names of the candidates, their caste identities were also made public. While many criticised the move and called the party head Prakash Ambedkar “casteist,” the party believes that the general public should know who their leaders are.
“We are a people’s party and believe in the Phule, Shahu, Ambedkar’s legacy. Our party was formed with the idea to organise all marginalised castes and communities and hand power over to their hands,” said Sujat, Ambedkar’s son and the party’s youth leader.
In the general elections, VBA along with its ally, the All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen (AIMIM) had contested all 48 seats.
While AIMIM candidate Imtiyaz Jaleel had managed to win from the Aurangabad constituency, in several other seats, VBA candidates managed to be in second position. AIMIM has since left the alliance.
VBA had then won about 9% vote share, which has encouraged it to put up candidates in 270 out of a total 288 constituencies. One of its promising leaders from the Dhangar community, Gopichand Padalkar, left the VBA to move to the BJP and is contesting from Baramati seat in western Maharashtra against NCP’s Ajit Pawar.