Maharashtra may defy bipolar logic

As assembly elections approach in mid-October, the battlefield in Maharashtra appears to be a ‘free-for-all’. The Congress-NCP Democratic Front coalition will be completing a decade in power. It returned to power in 2004 even without a track record of performance. Can this happen yet again?

This question can be tackled in three different contexts: one, it can be looked at against the backdrop of long-term trends in Indian politics; two, it can be answered in the context of the recently-held Lok Sabha elections; and, three, it can be examined within a state-specific context.

The first tells us that the survival possibilities of ‘incumbent’ governments have increased two-fold since the decade of 1989-98, when almost all incumbents were on a losing spree. But in 2008, we saw three of the four states in north India returning their governments to power. Before that, we had Gujarat, and after that we have had Andhra Pradesh and Orissa doing the same. In other words, the days of blind anti-incumbency are over.

State governments are getting much more money from the central government, and this helps them implement various welfare programmes to assuage popular disaffection. comes from the recently-held Lok Sabha election. We saw a mild turn in favour of the Congress, and if the state government can skillfully hide behind the goodwill of the central government, it can possibly duck anti-incumbency this time, too. If the Congress-NCP government gets re-elected, it would be matching the achievement of the BJP in neighbouring Gujarat, or the Congress in Delhi.

Matters get more complex when we look at state-specific factors. In 2004, the Congress-NCP combination saw a 10% drop in its vote compared to 1999 and still managed to return to power - at a time when the Sena-BJP alliance gained 3%. Today, these two coalitions have a net vote difference of 6% from 2004, which has come down to 5% in the recently-held Lok Sabha election. Paradoxically, between April and October, 2004, the ruling coalition lost votes while the opposition coalition gained. How did that happen? This is where you have to watch state specificities.

While the two coalitions in the state give us an artificial bipolarity, even a cursory acquaintance with state politics tells us that the real battle is multi-polar. The assembly election as a contest is much more open and accessible to a larger number of political players. It admits many more serious competitors in the battle.

For two reasons. One, smaller parties stand a greater chance of gaining winnable votes and, at worst, they can garner enough votes to upset many an applecart. Secondly, there are many more serious ‘independents’ and ‘rebels’ who defy the neat calculations of parties and observers alike. These two factors constrain the bipolarity and transform the electoral battlefield into a free-for-all. As the battle unfolds over the next few weeks, we shall keep returning to this state specificity that may hold the key to the outcome of the October assembly elections.