Jolted by the Lok Sabha election setback, the BJP has lowered its expectations for the upcoming Assembly elections in Maharashtra and set the target of winning 100 of the state’s 288 Assembly constituencies.
The party hopes to cross the halfway mark and get to 145 with the help of its allies Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). At present party has 106 Assembly seats.
Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said that there should be no ambiguity about the Mahayuti (name of the ruling alliance) returning to power. But to retain it we have to ensure 100 seats. If we cross the 100 mark, nobody will be able to form the government without the BJP.
The difference in the vote share between the Mahayuti and the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) in the Lok Sabha elections was just 0.3 percentage points. Fadnavis has been repeatedly emphasising that in terms of actual votes, the difference is just two lakh votes, a gap that can be easily bridged. At the workers’ meeting, Fadnavis said the Ekanth Shinde government’s Ladli Bahin Yojana would be enough to put the Mahayuti ahead.
“In Lok Sabha polls, the ‘400 paar’ slogan proved to be counter-productive. In Maharashtra, we said we would win more than 45 of the 48 Lok Sabha seats. But it boomeranged,” said a state BJP functionary. “Instead of focussing on high-pitched campaigns and projections, we have turned to the tried-and-tested formula of man-to-man connect across the state. We realised that the failure in the Lok Sabha was due to a disconnect with people on the ground.” The shift has come amid increased coordination between the BJP and the RSS. The link between the two is Fadnavis, who has a Sangh background and is leading the seat-sharing talks with the party’s Mahayuti allies. Over the past couple of months, Fadnavis has held at least four meetings with the RSS brass at its headquarters in Nagpur. The state BJP has 35 lakh active workers but believes that alone is not enough to win the polls and RSS boots will be needed on the ground.
“In every Assembly constituency, an RSS leader will be deployed to ensure perfect coordination with BJP and its allies. The Sangh cadre will also help take the Mahayuti government’s flagship projects – to the grassroots,” said a BJP insider. Apart from these, sources said all Hindu right-wing organisations had been activated to mobilise their supporters for the Assembly polls. As part of this, outfits such as the Sakal Hindu Samaj have hit the streets in pockets across the state, protesting against the alleged atrocities faced by Hindus in Bangladesh. Such outfits are planning to launch rallies on “love and land jihad”, their core themes fuelled by conspiracy theories.
The effort to bring the RSS back on board comes in the backdrop of differences between the two camps during the Lok Sabha polls. This divide came to light in the aftermath of the BJP’s subpar performance in the parliamentary elections.
In July, an RSS-linked Marathi weekly blamed the BJP’s tie-up with the NCP of Ajit Pawar for the alliance’s poor performance that saw it win only 17 of the 48 seats. The month before, in an article in RSS-affiliated Organiser, Pawar was blamed for reducing the “brand value of BJP” and turning it into “just another party without any difference”.
Coordination between the BJP and the Sangh in Maharashtra has also taken a hit because the state BJP has not had a general secretary for organisation since 2021. The post has traditionally been occupied by an RSS pracharak who served as the bridge between the Sangh and the party and quietly defused any potential problem points.
Despite its challenges, the BJP estimates it has 97,000 booth workers across all Assembly constituencies in the state. This provides it with a strong foundation to win the election. The challenge will be to ensure these workers are activated by the time the election campaign rolls in. The BJP has already started replacing non-performing individuals and teams at the booth level and this is expected to be followed by an organisational shake-up at the district level.
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