Mahayuti may come back to power tomorrow
The Maharashtra and Jharkhand elections results are scheduled to be announced tomorrow, 23rd Nov, 2024. Off late it has become a risky proposition to call elections, what with many stalwarts being humbled at the hustings. And here I am sticking out my neck and trying to call the Maharashtra elections. I run a real risk of being horribly wrong, but then doing political analysis purely as a hobby has its pluses, I don’t have much to lose.
I will not be predicting numbers in this blog, since I don’t have the resources to do so. But I have been doing a lot of reading and hearing a lot of news, podcasts in the run up to the election day. And directionally, my analysis tells me that the Mahayuti (nationally the NDA), comprised of the BJP the Shinde and Ajit Pawar factions of Shiv Sena and NCP respectively, may come back to power tomorrow. Here is why I feel so.
These elections have generally seen an absence of a discernible wave — either pro or anti — the current ruling coalition. That makes it a bit of a difficult election to call. Additionally, the two recently split factions belong to parties that originated out of personality cults. It is not uncommon in such situations for their respective voters to be very reticent in voicing out their real preferences when asked during the opinion and exit poll surveys. It is equally likely that those loyal voters may themselves be undecided right up to the election day, and hence many calculations may go wrong. This make the polls pretty unreliable, and may continue to do so till either this situation settles down as a new normal or one of the factions gets merged with its original parent or a new formulation altogether is formed. So I am not basing my analysis on the multiple exit polls that have come out. I feel the following three reasons may be why the Mahayuti may come back to power again.
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1) Higher Voter Turnout in favor of the Mahayuti. I remember during the Lok Sabha elections earlier this year, a common observation in Maharashtra was the lower voter turnout. Some experts theorized that this may have been because voters were disgusted with the politics of turncoats that had been going on in Maharashtra over the previous two years. A few others theorized that the supporters of the INDIA Alliance (led by Congress, and in Maharashtra also comprised of NCP Sharad Pawar Faction and Shiv Sena Uddhav Thackeray faction) were disheartened by the perceived pro-Modi wave in the media, and had not come out to vote. The final election results however indicated that the opposition had on the contrary managed superb voter mobilization and a very efficient consolidation of all the anti-incumbency vote, while the BJP led NDA had failed to do so.
I believe that the dip in voter numbers most probably came out of the loyal NDA voters, a large section of whom, in the misplaced confidence that their side was anyway winning, did not come out to vote. An unusual heat wave during the same time as well as a long weekend, courtesy most of the polling days coming adjoining weekends, also probably aided this trend. For this section of the electorate, the 2024 Lok Sabha results, particularly in Maharashtra may have come as a rude shock. And these people are likely to have come back in large numbers to vote during the assembly elections. I read the in general increased voter count in Maharashtra in this assembly elections as the Mahayuti (or NDA) voters who missed voting in May and are now coming out in large numbers to correct that wrong. If that is true, it doesn’t need an expert to guess who will benefit from this.
2) Splitting of Votes against the MVA. What was remarkable of the INDIA alliance in the Lok Sabha elections was the very efficient consolidation of anti-incumbency votes that they managed to bring about, particularly the Muslim and the Dalit votes, which did not split. The alliance was helped in no small measure by the many small parties like Prakash Ambedkar’s Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) or the Owaisi’s AIMIM. Since these parties had next to nil stake in the national elections, they had no problems holding back their candidates or playing a muted campaign to ensure that voters of their respective constituencies did not split their vote. But an assembly election is an altogether different ball game. They have a stake in the state politics and very clearly they have not agreed to hold back. Bhau Torsekar, a veteran Marathi Journalist and now a popular political analyst has put this very well in one of his recent podcast. He says there are about 13 small parties like VBA and AIMIM whose constituencies significantly overlap with that of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA or the INDIA Alliance nationally). He draws parallel with the recent Haryana elections. There during the Lok Sabha elections, NDA and INDIA Alliance together polled about 92% of the votes, but this share came down significantly as smaller parties like JJP, INLD etc. ate into vote shares of the dominant players. He further contends that in Maharashtra, not only is the number of such smaller parties more, almost all of them (with the exception of MNS of Raj Thackeray) compete for the same voter class as the MVA. In the Lok Sabha elections, the difference between the vote shares of NDA (Mahayuti in Maharashtra) and INDIA alliance (MVA in Maharashtra) was a mere 0.5%. It is any body’s guess what happens if all these small parties start eating into MVA’s vote share, in a situation where the difference between the two leading coalitions is already very small.
3) More positive messaging from the Mahayuti. Being a native Marathi speaker, I have the advantage of being able to listen to a lot of analysis from local experts. I often find them closer to the ground than the battery of Delhi based analysts who seldom understand politics beyond UP. And the sense I am getting was that not only did Mahayuti steal a march on the MVA by declaring their candidates early, they also have had fewer public disagreements. The two biggest constituents — BJP and the Shiv Sena Shinde faction — have very scrupulously ensured that there was no dissonance in their public positions. Even the Ajit Pawar group’s public disagreements have been few, on relatively minor issues (like giving ticket to Nawab Malik or his public disowning of Yogi Adityanath’s “Batenge to Katenge” slogan etc.) and have come very late in the run up to the elections. On the contrary, Congress and Shiv Sena UBT have had an almost public spat on seat sharing, on declaring the CM face etc. The Shiv Sena’s rather sharp and public admonishment of Congress after their Haryana loss was also not lost on the electorate. I do think somewhere these things make a difference. Unless there is so strong an anti-incumbency against the ruling party that the voters are willing to overlook such public spats, for an undecided voter, these things do not paint a good picture.
Add to the above, there may be other factors that may also play to the Mahayuti’ s favor, like the advantage they may get out of the ‘Ladki Bahin Yojana’ (in which the monthly payments have already started rolling out), their infrastructure work etc. We should also not discount the fact that BJP has a strong and efficient cadre base in Maharashtra, which is able to bring the voters to the polling booth, while Eknath Shinde, when he broke away, also took away many of the cadre in Konkan and the satellite townships adjoining Mumbai like Thane, Kalyan-Dombivali etc., who have traditionally formed the core base of Shiv Sena. This inherent strength in addition to the above factors may just see the Mahayuti come back to power tomorrow.
