In the parliamentary elections earlier this year, Maharashtra voted decisively for the Maha Vikas Aghadi, a coalition consisting of the Congress, the Shiv Sena faction led by Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar’s group of the Nationalist Congress Party.
It was the first electoral test since the Bharatiya Janata Party engineered splits in the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party. Five months on, the Mahayuti, a compact between the BJP, the Shiv Sena faction headed by Eknath Shinde and a group of the Nationalist Congress Party headed by Ajit Pawar, is hoping to regain lost ground.
Here are the five key factors at play in the assembly elections in the state.
Rural distress: Soybean and cotton
In August, the price for soybean plummeted to a 10-year low and has barely recovered since. Maharashtra is the second-largest producer of soybean in India. The oilseed is selling at Rs 1,000 below the Minimum Support Price of Rs 4,892 per quintal. The Narenda Modi government’s decision to increase import duties on edible oils to support domestic oilseed farmers, a reversal of its earlier policy, has not had the desired effect.
Soybean is primarily grown in Maharashtra’s Marathwada and Vidarbha regions. Marathwada accounts for 46 seats in the 288-member state assembly, while Vidharbha has 62.
“There is tremendous distress and the anger is loud, farmers are wondering how long they can continue farming while incurring sustained losses,” said Vijay Jawandhia, farmer leader from Vidarbha and founding member of the Shetkari Sanghatna.
However, he said it was not possible to say how this would influence voting patterns since in assembly polls, both the candidate and caste are equally important. “In fact there is polarisation along caste lines,” he said.
On Friday, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi promised a minimum support price of Rs 7,000 per quintal plus bonus for soybean if the Maha Vikas Aghadi comes to power.
Cotton is also selling below the Minimum Support Price. There are 40 lakh cotton farmers in Maharashtra. Vidarbha is known as the state’s cotton belt. The Congress has been demanding a ban on cotton imports.
Rebel candidates, smaller parties
There are 28% more candidates in this election when compared to the 2019 assembly polls. Of the 4,136 candidates in the fray, more than half – 2,086 – are independents. More than 70 of these independents are rebels from the six parties that form the two main coalitions. In many cases, the rebels have substantial local support and have the ability to undermine the official candidate.
The 1995 assembly polls in the state saw the highest number of independents being voted in – 45.
Several smaller parties too have fielded a sizeable number of candidates. For example, the Bahujan Samaj Party has candidates in 237 of the 288 seats, Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi is fighting 200, while Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena is contesting 125.
Nitin Birmal, Maharashtra coordinator for the Lokniti election research initiative, believes that smaller parties and rebel candidates have the ability to put a spanner in the works. “Assembly constituencies, unlike Parliamentary seats, have a smaller electorate of around 3.5 lakh votes,” he said. “Victory margins are also smaller.”
Competitive welfarism
On the eve of the assembly polls, the Mahayuti government launched the Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojna direct cash transfer scheme. Since July, it has been paying Rs 1,500 to women between the ages of 21 and 65 years, if they have an annual family income of up to Rs 2.5 lakh.
Political observer Girish Kuber said that the Election Commission’s decision to delay the polls allowed the state to pay four to five months of installments into women’s bank accounts under the scheme. “This is likely to help the Mahayuti in urban areas, I doubt the impact will be the same in rural areas where there is agrarian distress,” he said.
To counter this, the Maha Vikas Aghadi has announced that it will institute its own cash transfer scheme for women if elected to power. Under its Mahalakshmi Yojna, it will pay women in Maharashtra Rs 3,000 per month.
Hindutva bogeymen
Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis of the BJP has doubled down on his remarks that during the Lok Sabha polls, the state experienced a “vote jihad” – a pejorative reference to the voting pattern of Muslims. On Friday he called for a “dharma-yudh” or a religious war for Hindu votes.
The party’s allies in the Mahayuti have expressed their disquiet with the rhetoric of the BJP’s star campaigner, Adityanath, especially his slogan, “Batenge toh katege” – if we are divided, we will perish. But that has not held him back from trying to polarise the electorate.
In the months leading up to the assembly polls, an organisation called the Hindu Sakal Samaj, with the backing of the BJP, has been holding “anti-love-jihad” rallies across the state. They are pushing the Hindutva conspiracy theory that Muslim win are courting Hindu women merely to convert them to Islam.
In the midst of this, Home Minister Amit Shah has promised an anti-conversion law on the lines of the legislations in place in some BJP-ruled states.
Caste calculations
The Maratha community’s demand to be included in the list of Other Backward Classes and the Mahayuti’s ambivalent stand on the matter resulted in the alienation of both the Marathas and the OBCs, observers say. This resulted in the BJP losing all the parliamentary seats it contested in Marathwada, they say.
Senior BJP leaders concede that the party’s equivocation on including Marathas in the Other Backward Classes list is likely to have caused anxiety among OBCs – strong supporters of the party – because they fear their share of reservations in educational institutions and government jobs will shrink.
Buoyed by the success of its strategy to consolidate non-Jat votes in the Haryana election in October, the BJP has been making efforts to consolidate the non-Maratha votes, primarily the OBCs in the state.
Among the measures it has taken: increasing from Rs 8 lakh to Rs 15 lakh the limit that defines the creamy layer of members of marginalised groups who are better off than others in the community, including seven to 10 more castes in the central list of OBCs and setting up Economic Welfare Corporations for OBC subgroups.
