BJP’s identity crisis in state

Is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Maharashtra day dreaming? One of the rumours doing the rounds about why Gopinath Munde got a ticket for his daughter is that he wanted to have someone who will vacate an assembly seat, should he decide to come to the state and become chief minister!

This represents the state of the BJP: that Munde would need his daughter since no one else will vacate a seat for him; but more than that, the audacity that the BJP would get more seats than the Shiv Sena, and together they may be in a majority and Munde will be the alliance’s choice for chief minister.

Some years ago, when Pandurang Phundkar from Vidarbha was the state president, he gave the slogan, ‘Shat Pratishat Bhajapa’ (Cent Percent BJP). Since then, the BJP continues to be number four among the major players in the state and the loss of power at the Centre, the passing away of Pramod Mahajan have badly demoralised the party. Add to this the ongoing factional battle between Munde and Nitin Gadkari and you have a complete recipe for redundancy.

As it happens in the case of most promising leaders these days, Munde has hastily been promoted to the ‘national’ level; meaning that the state BJP is either orphaned or rudderless. Add to this the complications arising from its two-decade old alliance with Shiv Sena. While in the late eighties, when both Sena and BJP were weak parties in the state, the alliance made sense. Now, for both, but more so for the BJP, the alliance has become a burden impossible to get rid of. If the BJP severs the alliance, it shrinks further and if it continues the alliance, it has to stagnate organisationally.

The state BJP unit was among the first few in the BJP to change its social profile—-in the eighties, the party facilitated the rise of Munde, who hails from Marathwada and belongs to the backward community, Vanjari. Similar efforts to project other OBC leaders—-Dange (Dhangar) and Farande (Mali) failed and the party slowly came under the influence of Munde, through late Pramod Mahajan’s skillful steering.

But in terms of followers, the BJP in Maharashtra has singularly failed to attract any particular social section. It mostly relies on traditional white collar middle class base in some areas, local bases cultivated by individual leaders and the contingent support from the leftovers. In Maharashtra the BJP experiment of bringing together the upper castes and the lower OBCs has not yielded desired results. That is where lies the identity crisis of the state BJP. Nobody knows who the party belongs to and who the party represents.

The author teaches pol science at Pune University