Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray criticizes prime minister Narendra Modi over shifting his focus from the Centre to Maharashtra, and doing little to stop the provocation by Pakistan at the Line of Control.
How bad is the negative campaigning?
The former BJP ally has also equated Modi and his team of ministers who are campaigning in the state to the assault by Afzal Khan and his army on Shivaji's kingdom.
Modi has not responded to Thackeray, but instead he has targeted Sharad Pawar, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief, slamming the former agriculture minister for farmer suicides in the state.
Such negative campaigning is known to benefit the challengers, while incumbents rely on boasting about their achievements.
Why are incumbents also on negative path?
However, with the split in the ruling Congress-NCP alliance, the leaders of both parties have been hitting out at each other rather than focusing on the work they have done in the 15 years they ruled the state together.
Now, Ajit Pawar, who was deputy chief minister till a fortnight ago, is threatening to set up a probe against the former chief minister Prithviraj Chavan to look into the numerous files that were cleared by his office within a few days before the polls were announced.
Chavan, who has positioned himself as "Mr Clean", has hit back at Ajit pointing to his alleged role in "scams" and his chief ministerial ambitions.
How has this affected the voters?
This has left many voters confused and disinterested. "No party is talking about its manifesto. They are simply maligning each other. This is strange, when we should be looking to choose the least corrupt, the least criminal and the somewhat efficient politicians from among them all," says Bhavna Sagar, a banker.
Political observes explain that democracy is a dialogue between political leaders and citizens and election campaigns provide the most obvious and loudest platform for such a dialogue. "This dialogue is becoming more and more negative in Maharashtra on account of the break-up of the alliances," says one analyst.
Is negative campaigning really effective?
Negative campaigning is presumed to be an unusually effective means to woo voters, especially in the age of television and social media. "Negative information is more likely to be noticed and processed than positive information, thereby presenting a better opportunity to get the message across to people," according to Richard Lau and Gerald Pomper of Rutgers University.
"Another reason is based on better survival benefits resulting from avoiding losses rather than approaching the gains," the two researchers state in a joint paper.
Negativism enhances the feeling of political inefficiency. Some studies in the US have shown that negative campaigning has a positive impact on voter choice and turnout also.
Is this unique to Maharashtra?
Political parties are aware about the benefits. The Sena and the NCP are regional players, but their former allies are national parties. The core constituencies of these parties are nearly the same and this poses another problem.
So Uddhav attacking the BJP, Amit Shah and Modi during his public meetings rather than talking about development, which was the plank before the alliance broke up, appears quite natural.
The Lok Sabha witnessed similar negative campaigning. The BJP's strategy was aggressively anti-Congress and anti-Gandhi family and the party countered similar negative talk by the Congress which targeted Modi.
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