As the Maharashtra Assembly — elections to which will be held on Tuesday — has 288 seats, the expectation is that no one party will get a majority on its own and independent candidates will play a big role in helping either the ruling or opposition alliances reach the halfway mark.
The latest internal assessment of the Congress high command suggests the party will get around 91 seats (against 73 in the last Assembly elections), ally Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) will go down to just between 49 and 51 seats (69 in the last Assembly), while the debutant Navnirman Sena (MNS) will hardly get 10 seats but damage the chances of the Shiv Sena in many seats.
In 1995, Independents played a crucial role to form the BJP-Shiv Sena government. and this time too, both sides think the unattached MLAs will become ‘prized catches’ after the polls.
The face of the Maharashtra battle may be the ruling Congress-NCP alliance versus the Opposition Sena-BJP combine. But the political fight in the state is also about the damaging capacity of the MNS and the Independents, power woes versus the goodwill of farm loan waiver, caste equations versus the ‘stability’ campaign, aging Balasaheb Thackeray’s ‘clarion call’ versus Rahul Gandhi’s pitch for the youth.
In 2006, Khairlanji village in eastern Maharashtra came under a spotlight for the gruesome murder of two Dalit women by the socially powerful Kunbi caste. In the run-up to this year’s polls, nobody in Khairlanji is ready to talk about the incident. But in the local tea stall, the dalits and the Kunbis will speak in one common voice: “We don’t get power for more than 12-14 hours daily in our village.”
And if you thought only rural Maharashtra is reeling from power crisis, Lata Pandharipande, a resident of Nagpur, will also remind you that in the state’s third largest city (after Mumbai and Pune), the power is unavailable for at least six hours everyday.
After ruling 10 years in the land of Chhatrapati Shivaji, the Congress-NCP alliance faces flak in a large part of the state on the deteriorating power situation. While Union Minority Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid, at a press conference in Mumbai, asks for more time to solve the power crisis, NCP supremo and Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar has a more feeble answer. “The Shiv Sena can’t solve the power crisis,” he told a poll rally in Amaravati recently.
