There was, on the one hand, the extraordinarily poor governance provided by the Congress alliance. And there was, on the other, the BJP-Shiv Sena's debacle in the general election of April-May. |
There was, too, the large number of seats being contested by rebel candidates from both the major political formations. Given these factors, the results in the Maharashtra assembly election are not in the least surprising. |
Even the election of the former gangland boss from Chinchpokli in Mumbai is not. Indeed, the results would have been surprising if either of the alliances had won a clear majority. The only question always was how big the difference between the Congress and the BJP alliances would be. |
That, in turn, depended on the rebel candidates. In the event, they won 30 seats, leaving 141 to be won by the NCP-Congress alliance and 117 to the Shiv Sena-BJP one. The macro-result, therefore, tells us nothing new. |
At the disaggregated level, there are at least two surprises. One is that the NCP won more seats than the Congress. The other is that within an hour of this being known, Sharad Pawar claimed the chief ministership for his own party. |
This has created a problem that is not going to be as easy to resolve as the one at the Centre was in May. Renunciation may work for Sonia Gandhi personally but it will not work for Maharashtra's Congressmen. The difference in seats is too small. |
The best one can hope for is some sort of a revolving door formula of the sort in Jammu and Kashmir. What that does to the governance of such an important state is anyone's guess. |
It is already hugely in debt and unless the new government faces up to the fiscal issues, Maharashtra is well on the way to becoming the West's Bihar, at least in fiscal terms. |
As for the Shiv Sena-BJP, they have their task as well cut out as the new government, with the difference that theirs is essentially a political challenge. |
It would seem that the politics of religious divisiveness has run its course, perhaps because the electorate is preponderantly young "" below 25 "" and wants jobs, not nonsense about Us versus Them. |
Their vote share has slipped hugely. It is not as if the Sena-BJP didn't know this. Indeed, that is why Bal Thackeray's son, Uddhav, took the non-Hindutva line. But it takes time and effort to acquire a new image. |
So it will be interesting to see how the struggle between the new and the old approaches in the larger Sangh Parivar shapes up. The dilemma, as can be seen from the Congress' own lukewarm approach to economic reform and its rapid recourse to the old populism of the 1970s, could be very intractable. It makes the task of modernising the institutions of governance that much harder. |
A much larger question that the political class must face is this: given the apparent success of populism, has economic despair in the country reached the same proportions as at the end of the 1960s? |
That period, too, followed high growth accompanied by worsening income distribution. And, if so, should the response be the same as before or a bold new thrust at reform? |