Five predicaments of Pawar’s NCP

As the elections to the Maharashtra assembly approach, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) faces the worst crisis of its 10 years in existence. April’s Lok Sabha election saw considerable humiliation for the party. Following that, the Congress mustered courage to delay seat-sharing talks with the NCP and to allow its state leaders to keep up the pressure by constantly threatening to ‘go it alone’.

What ails the party which was until recently projecting its leader as a possible candidate for the prime ministership?
Consistently in its life of a decade, the NCP has been unable to ward off the image of a Maratha party — both in terms of the leadership profile and in terms of its main vote-catchment area. Does the party want only these Maratha votes? Does the party want its OBC leaders to grow? Or does it want to reduce itself into a narrow-based party of the Marathas? The irony is that in the recent Lok Sabha elections it failed to get substantial Maratha votes.
As happens in most state-level parties in India, the NCP, too, is facing the issue of family inheritance. Will it be the daughter or will it be the nephew? Whoever it is, leadership opportunities for those who pledged their political careers at the altar of Pawar’s ambitions will soon find themselves in the wilderness.

How the party resolves this issue of leadership is a crucial test for its long-term viability as a contender for power in the state. When Pawar first left the Congress fold and formed his Congress(S), he could attract young entrants to politics. The Congress was developing into a fiefdom of a chain of district-level leaders and Pawar’s party facilitated the entry of young aspirants into politics.

The NCP has singularly failed to perform that role in its current incarnation. Instead, everywhere it has become a springboard for the next generation of entrenched leaders — one only has to list the names of its candidates to find proof of this.

Fourthly, the NCP has singularly failed to spread beyond Western Maharashtra. While some presence is noted in the Konkan and North Maharashtra, the huge potential for expansion in Marathwada has simply been frittered away by the party. Recently, the incarceration of one its stalwarts from Marathwada gave the party the necessary breathing space to expand in that region and free itself of the stranglehold of traditional party lords.

But by all indications, the party seems to be reluctant to do that. Finally, and inevitably then, the NCP becomes increasingly less ‘coalitionable’. The Congress does not want to do much business with it, given a choice, while given Pawar’s national-level political future, his party will find it very difficult to think of other coalitions. So, it has nowhere to go except the Congress and that shrinks the negotiating space for the NCP.

Over the next few weeks and beyond, it will be exciting to watch how the NCP deals with this interlocking set of predicaments.

The author teaches political science at the University of Pune.