Role call

The coming state assembly elections in Maharashtra are of capital importance for a host of reasons. It will be the first real popularity test for the Congress-led government at the Centre. Conversely, the Bharatiya Janata Party and its regional ally hope to cash in on popular discontent with the Sushil Shinde regime and return to power in the mantralaya. But the polls also matter as it is the test of two key strongmen ? Sharad Pawar in the ruling alliance, and the strategist who got his numbers all wrong last summer for the BJP, Pramod Mahajan. The Shiv Sena in turn is hoping to solve the succession question in the Thackeray family, with Uddhav earning his spurs to succeed the ageing Bal Thackeray. And finally, the Dalit leadership is also up for grabs with Mayavati hoping to upstage the country?s oldest Dalit political force ? the Republican Party of India.

The state itself is in the throes of far-reaching cultural and social changes, with reverberations across the body politic. Bombay was the birthplace of the Congress in the 1880s and the Shiv Sena in the Sixties. It is not only the financial capital of the country but also the centre of the oldest and closest ideological fellow-traveller of the BJP. Mumbai was the place where the Congress and its allies retook urban territories that have been a haven for the BJP and its allies since the early Nineties. Its increasingly cosmopolitan character, with Marathi speakers now down to only one in four voters, enabled a Congress alliance victory in May. If the alliance repeats its performance, it will have secured a new urban bastion.

Last summer, traditional roles were reversed. The BJP-led saffron alliance won as many as 24 of the 40 rural Lok Sabha seats, even as it was virtually wiped off the map in the three large urban conurbations of Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur. The arithmetic of coalitions favoured the Congress, which with its allies, polled a hefty 45 per cent of the vote. Yet, broken down into assembly segments, it still lagged behind the National Democratic Alliance, having got the first slot in only 139 segments.

History provides cold comfort for the rulers, whatever the forecast of the opinion polls. The last time that a ruling party returned to power was in 1990, when Pawar managed to craft a winning social alliance with the Republican Party of India. Ramdas Athavale was made deputy chief minister, even though his Dalit party won no seats; it was a recognition of the fact that even for the mighty Congress, smaller allies could make all the difference between defeat and victory.

Yet, the record of that five-year spell in power was lacklustre. The massacres of Muslims on December 1992 and January 1993 were a blot not only on the city of Mumbai but also on the ability of Maharashtra to provide minimal security to its citizens. Soon after, the series of bomb blasts shook the city?s confidence, exposed the emerging links between terrorism and the underworld and contributed to a groundswell of support, at least in urban areas, for the Shiv Sena and its ally, the BJP.

The last five years have been free of such cataclysmic events. But there is a feeling that the government has not come to grips with any aspect of public life. Coalitions are notoriously poor in taking correctives for public finance, but in this case, the state?s debt has now touched Rs 100,000 crore. In fact, until the victory of the United Progressive Alliance in May 2004, there was not even a clear policy in place to assist farmers in distress due to repeated droughts in Marathwada.

Since Pawar became Union food and agriculture minister, he has used every policy lever to help bolster support. Import of over 100,000 tonnes of raw cane was aimed at getting half the state?s sugar mills running again. Cotton procurement is similarly crucial in Vidarbha. The export policy announced by Kamal Nath and the liberal credit regime inaugurated by P. Chidambaram also have major implications, which the market-friendly farmers of the western state will not have missed.

In Vidarbha, once a Congress bastion, a fledgling party like the Bahujan Samaj Party, which has never polled even 0.5 per cent of the vote, took a hefty seven per cent of all votes in the 66 assembly segments in the region. The BSP?s advent has come not a day too soon. The RPI, once a powerful Dalit organization, is now split into as many as nine factions. Its leadership has been singularly unable to alleviate the problems of its constituents and has often become a tool for various factions of the Congress. In contrast, Mayavati has no shortage of resources, and is able to attract rebel candidates of the upper castes. Nobody can estimate what her impact will be. But the first step of the party in any state is to eat into the Congress vote bank among the underclasses.

In an election as closely fought as Maharashtra?s, that spells trouble. Mayavati?s influence is unlikely to be limited to any one region of the state. There is a yearning for a third option that led to the downfall of the Congress in the 1995 assembly polls and a year later in the Lok Sabha elections. What is tragic is the way key issues of governance have been swept under the carpet in the public arena. Water might be scarce in a drought year in two important regions, but no one is raising the question of the way in which the pricing policy encourages cane cultivation in vast areas. Nor is anyone crafting a less water-intensive alternative. The Shiv Sena may have been out of power but its culture of intolerance has not let up in Mumbai. The Congress regime has merely looked the other way time and again. Most galling is the snail?s pace at which the trial of the 1,300 odd cases of the 1993 riots have been progressing.

Even the much-vaunted Employment Guarantee Scheme has not prevented malnutrition-induced deaths in the adivasi belt north of Mumbai. The ruling alliance is counting on the accretion of numbers due to the tie-up between Pawar and Sonia Gandhi. Yet, history has shown how seemingly well-placed governments can stumble and fall due to a lacklustre performance. It is not so much the opposition?s promise of a better regime as the anger against an older one that has been the undoing of many a chief minister in the last few years. That is what the saffron alliance is counting on. This is a state election in a long time where the alliance is in the race. For the two key combinations in Indian politics, this is a prestige issue.