The ruling Mahayuti alliance cruised to a landslide victory in the Maharashtra assembly elections, winning 235 of the 288 seats, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) registering its best performance ever in the state by emerging as the single largest party after securing 132 seats.
The Mahayuti win crushed the opposition coalition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), whose joint tally was at 50, leaving it with scant opportunity to even claim the position of the leader of the Opposition in the assembly.
The BJP recorded the highest ever seats won by any party in the last 34 years; the undivided Congress had won 141 seats in 1990, when there was no strong opponent against it. At the height of the Modi wave in 2014, the BJP won 122 seats, which got depleted in 2019 to 105 seats.
The MVA, which was confident of making it to the halfway mark in the 288-seat house, stood decimated, with the Shiv Sena (UBT) bagging 20 seats, the NCP (SP) at 10 and the Congress getting 16, and others winning 4 seats. This was a sharp reversal of fortunes from the Lok Sabha elections six months ago when the MVA won 30 of 48 seats, while the Mahayuti won 17.
Among those who lost were senior Congress leader Balasaheb Thorat (Sangamner), the Congress’s working president Arif Naseem Khan (Chandivali, Mumbai) and former minister Yashomati Thakur (Teosa, Amravati).
What worked for Mahayuti
The corrective steps taken by the ruling parties soon after the rout in the Lok Sabha by launching welfare schemes to benefit a cross-section of society (prominently, the Ladki Bahin Yojana for women), social engineering by constituting boards for various communities, and galvanising the Hindutva vote bank seem to have worked.
On Saturday, chief minister Eknath Shinde attributed the win to “a combination of welfare schemes and development done by our government in the last two and a half years”.
He added that through the Ladki Bahin scheme and the Shasan Apalya Dari (government at your doorstep), the government managed to reach out to 50 million people. “We gave compensation of ₹15,000 crore and introduced schemes worth ₹45,000 crore for farmers,” Shinde said.
Deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said: “We bow down before the people. This result has added to our responsibility. The people of Maharashtra supported PM Narendra Modi’s slogan ‘Ek Hain To Safe Hain’.”
A senior BJP leader, requesting anonymity, underscored that the alliance had “pulled out all the stops in the last six months” to win over the electorate.
“The Lok Sabha defeat in Maharashtra was largely due to the narrative surrounding scrapping of the Indian Constitution which led to a swing in minority and Dalit votes. Muslim voters, who are around 14%, and their high turnout led to the defeat in many constituencies. The party decided to consolidate Hindu votes instead of wooing Muslim voters,” he said, adding that metros like Mumbai saw a high voter turnout, where the BJP dominates.
MVA’s losses
The opposition MVA leaders termed the results “unexpected and unbelievable”.
On Saturday, Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray said, “We all know that the mood on the ground was against the government. Did people vote in their favour because farmers are not getting prices for soybean and cotton? Were the people happy over inflation? The secret behind the BJP’s success will be out soon.” Ten of the 20 seats which the Shiv Sena (UBT) won are in Mumbai. The party had contested 95 seats as part of the alliance.
Congress in-charge for Maharashtra, Ramesh Chennithala said the verdict “does not reflect the mood of the people in the state”.
“The mood of the people who voted for the MVA in the Lok Sabha cannot change in such a short period. We will probe the unexpected results,” he said.
