BJP National President Amit Shah along with party workers addresses a public meeting at Tohana in Haryana on Monday. PTI The Bharatiya Janata Party, fresh from the victory in the Lok Sabha elections, will go alone in both Maharashtra and Haryana, as per a calculated strategy. The party, which has come to absolute power at the Centre with the leadership of Narendra Modi, does not want to be a junior partner to its allies. Soon after the Lok Sabha victory, the party broke its alliance with Haryana Janhit Congress led by Kuldeep Bishnoi, engineered major defections from the Congress, and declared its solo effort. Now it has broken the 25 year old alliance with Shiv Sena in Maharashtra. But even though it is a 25 year old alliance, the Shiv Sena-BJP combination came only once to power in 1995. Otherwise the combination has lost four elections to its opponents - first to Congress and then to the Congress-NCP alliance.
Though Narendra Modi had claimed that the National Democratic Alliance had been enlarged to include 24 parties for fighting the Lok Sabh elections, the reality is that only two major parties are in the NDA - Akali Dal of Punjab, which is the oldest ally, and Telugu Desham of Andhra Pradesh, which has come into the NDA fold again this year. Otherwise majority of the parties do not have widespread influence in their own states. Before the Lok Sabha elections, the Janata Dal (united), a partner for 16 years, had moved out of NDA protesting against the BJP unanimously selecting Narendra Modi as the prime ministerial candidate.
Both Modi and BJP national president Amit Shah believe that the time is ripe for establishing the pan Indian presence of the party.
They are enthused by the decline of regional forces like the CPM in West Bengal, the split among Thackerey cousins in Maharashtra and the latest troubles of AIADMK and its supremo Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu. When rural development minister Gopinath Munde died in a road accident in Delhi, the BJP had lost a strong supporter of the alliance with Shiv Sena, as the other heavyweight from Maharashtra Nitin Gadkari had tepid relationship with Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackerey. In fact Thackerey had accused Gadkari of working secretly for an alliance with Maharashtra Navnirmana Sena, run by estranged cousin Raj Thackerey, but finally BJP went ahead with Shiv Sena in the Lok Sabha elections.
The elections in both Maharahstra and Haryana would be a test for the Modi factor. Modi is expected to address a dozen election rallies in both the states to galvanise his party cadres. In both states the BJP does not have a commanding figure who can be projected as the chief ministerial candidate. Gadkari has ruled himself out, and he is also resisted by supporters of Gopinath Munde. Other union minsters like Prakash Javadekar and Piyush Goyal are also not seen as chief ministerial material. The most prominent BJP leader from Haryana is Sushma Swaraj, who was one of the youngest ministers of the state more than three decades ago. But she moved long ago to national politics and she is also getting elected from Madhya Pradesh. Interestingly, Sushma's sister Vandana Sharma has been given an assembly ticket in Haryana.
A victory in both states would give more confidence to BJP as its next electoral strengths are in Jammu and Kashmir as well as Jharkhand, where it did well in the Lok Sabha elections. But a defeat especially in Maharashtra, would put strong questions on the organisational skills of Amit Shah, who has already suffered setback in assembly by elections in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat.
Tailpiece: After ensuring that former minister Ajit Singh vacated the ministerial bungalow amidst controversy and protests, the urban development ministry is working out legal steps to take possession of the bungalow on Krishna Menon Marg which has been allotted to Jagjivan Ram memorial trust, headed by former Lok Sabha speaker Meira Kumar. She had spearheaded the effort to reverse a decision of Atal Behari Vajpayee government to take back the bungalow and had got the bungalow occupied by her father, a former deputy prime minister. The bungalow was reallocated to the trust during UPA rule.
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