MNS not in poll fray, but Raj Thackeray a key campaigner for NCP-Congress

Election campaigning in Maharashtra ended on Saturday evening, but had reached a crescendo 24 hours earlier when two simultaneous public rallies held the state’s attention — one that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis addressed in Mumbai, and the other by Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray in Nashik.

On Facebook, the live streams of the two public meetings had near equal viewership. Nearly 9,000 people watched Thackeray’s speech live as it neared its end on Friday evening. Around the same time, Modi’s speech hooked around 10,000 people. Live viewers for the same public meeting could not cross 4,000 when Fadnavis addressed it.

Fifty-year-old Thackeray’s well-attended public meetings in the last two legs of the election in Maharashtra — where 17 remaining seats go to the polls on Monday — has come as a shot in the arm for the beleaguered Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) alliance.

Such has been Thackeray’s popularity that neither NCP chief Sharad Pawar nor Congress chief Rahul Gandhi addressed any rallies in Mumbai in the last couple of days. The surprising bit is that Thackeray-led MNS is not contesting a single seat in the ongoing Lok Sabha polls.

In his public meetings, Thackeray has sought to deconstruct the Modi government’s performance and poke holes in the aura that the prime minister has come to enjoy among large sections of the people. With mainstream news outlets unwilling to telecast his speeches, Thackeray has made effective use of social media.

Thackeray and his MNS have occupied the margins of Maharashtra politics for nearly a decade. However, Thackeray has used the Lok Sabha polls to reinvent himself and prove to be of value to the Congress-NCP alliance.

To prepare for his flurry of public meetings, Thackeray turned to exhaustive research, collated evidence from news channels and social media video clips to support his arguments, and used audio-visual tools that helped his oratory in the public meetings to stand out.

MNS leader Anil Shidore, who helped Thackeray prepare, believes his party has elevated the level of public debate.

Congress strategists are busy wondering the price Thackeray would extract from the alliance for the Maharashtra Assembly polls, scheduled for September-October.

In the 2009 Lok Sabha polls, MNS clocked nearly 137,000 votes per seat on average, analysis of election data maintained by Ashoka University’s Trivedi Centre for Political Data shows. It ate into the vote base of Shiv Sena and the BJP, said eminent political scientist Suhas Palshikar.

However, both Shidore and Palshikar now think that voter support base of leading political parties/alliances in Maharashtra has changed drastically after 2014. “MNS voters and Shiv Sena/BJP voters are a common lot does not hold true anymore. It changed from 2014,” Shidore said.

Palshikar said there was a lot of overlap between Shiv Sena and NCP voters in Mumbai, and the MNS could attract voters from the traditional support bases of all political parties, including the Congress. “The Shiv Sena has attacked the BJP while being a party in power in the state and the Centre. There is a section of Shiv Sena voters who feel disgruntled about supporting the BJP,” he said. Palshikar added that this, in addition to other factors, could limit the Shiv Sena-BJP lead to an extent.

As Palshikar pointed out Thackeray is upping the ante for the Assembly elections. In the 2014 general elections, the MNS contested in 10-seats, receiving 70,000 votes per seat on average.

These votes were insignificant when compared with the victory margins of Shiv Sena-BJP combine candidates, who won all these 10 parliamentary seats. MNS performed poorly in the following assembly and local body elections, too.

However, the Congress is struggling to find its feet in the changed political firmament of Maharashtra. Dalit leader Prakash Ambedkar and AIMIM’s Asaduddin Owaisi are chipping away at the Congress’s support base among Dalits and Muslims.

In the NCP, Pawar’s nephew Ajit and daughter Supriya Sule are effective in Baramati, but do not have common connect across the state. Maratha politics is also in churn with depleting groundwater affecting sugarcane produce, and farmers losing the prosperity they had come to take for granted. NCP and Congress leaderships own several of the sugar and bank cooperatives.

It is in this larger context and with support bases of the Congress and the NCP in a flux, Thackeray is trying to find a space for himself by the time Assembly polls come knocking in September. In a state where people admire their politicians to be “macho” but also educated and suave, Thackeray could pitch himself as the only leader in the opposition space who can challenge Fadnavis.