The Contenders
Maharashtra voted for its fifteenth legislative assembly on 20 November. It has always been a critical battleground state for both the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party, as it sends the second largest number of legislators to Lok Sabha and houses India’s financial capital, Mumbai, and is home to the headquarters of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. However, the state has never been a direct contest between national players, instead inventing a long tradition of alliance governments with the regional powerhouses—the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party. The 2024 contest will differ drastically from any previous election, being the first since both the NCP and Sena split in a political crisis in 2022.
The Sena faction led by Eknath Shinde could prove that they controlled a majority of the party’s legislators and thus represented the party, while its previous leader, Uddhav Thackeray—the son of Sena founder Bal Thackeray—had to establish a new party called the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), with only 15 of the 56 state legislators the united party had elected in 2019 that remained loyal to it.
Meanwhile, Ajit Pawar, the nephew of NCP founder Sharad Pawar, broke away with 41 of the united party’s 53 MLAs, like Shinde, taking with him the party’s name and its clock symbol. The uncle’s party is now called the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) and is fighting the assembly polls in alliance with the Congress and the SS (UBT), called the Maha Vikas Aghadi. Opposing them is the Mahayuti alliance of Shinde’s Shiv Sena, the BJP and Ajit Pawar’s NCP.
For all six of the major factions, this election would prove crucial. The two Senas are facing each other in 36 constituencies, and the victor would largely get to represent itself as the one true Shiv Sena, particularly since both factions performed similarly in the Lok Sabha polls earlier this year.
In that election, the SS (UBT) won nine seats, but the Shiv Sena had a better strike rate of 46.6 percent, compared to the SS (UBT)’s 42.85 percent. While the Sena retained 12.92 percent voteshare—more than half of the united Sena’s voteshare in the 2019 general election—the SS (UBT) had a far higher total voteshare at 16.72 percent, suggesting the party did benefit from a transfer of votes from its alliance partners. Of the 13 seats where the Shiv Sena and SS (UBT) had a direct fight, the former won seven. As The Caravan’s Ajeet Mahale reported, the battle between the two Shiv Sena factions may well provide a glimpse into what motivates and influences the traditional Shiv Sena voter.
The situation is significantly harder for Ajit Pawar’s NCP, which won only one of the four seats it contested, gaining merely 3.61 percent voteshare in the general election, while the NCP (SP) won eight of the ten seats it contested and a total voteshare of 10.27 percent, a fair bit less than the 16.77 percent it had won in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The two NCPs are facing each other in direct contests in 38 seats, a vast majority in the Paschim Maharashtra region, including the prestigious Baramati seat, which has been the fort of the Pawars since 1991. Ajit Pawar will face Yugendra Pawar, his nephew.
A loss for the BJP in this year’s state polls would prove dangerous as it would indicate a national downturn for the party, after a disappointing performance in national elections—suggesting its recent victory in Haryana was an exception. It would also lead to the party losing the last of India’s big metros to the opposition, which could hamper its funding and campaign financing—its most distinct advantage over any other political formation in India. And this would only be continuing a trend visible for the past twenty years, in which the party got less voteshare—nearly ten percent—in the state polls mere months after the national polls. The Congress did uncharacteristically well in the Lok Sabha polls, winning 13 seats, up from the single seat it had won in 2019. A loss in Maharashtra, particularly after becoming the single biggest party from the state in Lok Sabha mere months ago, would dash any hopes of a resurgent Congress, particularly after a humiliating defeat in Haryana.
The state’s astoundingly close margins make it a region rich with influential third parties. The Jan Surajya Shakti, Rashtriya Yuva Swabhiman Party and Rajarshi Shahu Vikas Aghadi are contesting six for the Mahayuti alongside support from the non-contesting Prahar Janshakti Party, Rashtriya Samaj Paksha and the Republican Party of India (Athawale).
The MVA has offered 18 seats to the Samajwadi Party, the Peasants and Workers Party of India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India.
Besides these allies, there are several other parties in the fray, such as the Vanchit Bahujan Aaghadi—led by Prakash Ambedkar, the grandson of BR Ambedkar—and the All India Majlis-e-Ittihadul Muslimeen, which won two seats in 2014 and 2019. The former has fielded 200 candidates, while the latter is contesting in 16 seats.
The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena—led by Uddhav’s cousin Raj Thackeray—is also in the fray in 135 seats, though their best chances are in the 25 constituencies they are fighting in their Mumbai bastion. The MNS won a single seat in 2014 and 2019, though their voteshare fell from 3.5 percent, to 2.25. In certain seats, where the MVA has a substantial presence, the Mahayuti is seen backing MNS candidates, to play a spoiler in the polls.
The Bahujan Vikas Aghadi, which supported the Mahayuti when it came to power in 2022, has fielded three candidates, while the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Azad Samaj Party (Kanshiram) and Mahadev Jankar’s Rashtriya Samaj Party are contesting in 239, 40 and 93 seats respectively.
Omprakash Babarao Kadu–better known as Bachchu Kadu—who is the founder of Prahar Janshakti Party and Raju Shetti of the Swabhimani Paksha also announced a third alliance. The former was associated with the Mahayuti and the latter has links to farmer organisations in Paschim Maharashtra.
As a result of the present coalitions and as the state enters an era of fragmented parties and ideological rootlessness, the candidature in each constituency has often gone to just one party within an alliance, leading to an increase in the number of rebel candidates. Many times, multiple candidates from the same party and alliance filed their nominations, one on the party’s ticket and another as an independent. The state already has a vast array of unaligned independent candidates, many of whom have won against both major alliances. During the Lok Sabha election, one independent won. To complicate matters further, Maharashtra has seen a rise of dummy candidates—candidates with the same name funded by rival politicians but standing as an independent—with a reported 150 NCP (SP) candidates with dummy candidates against them who had been given a symbol similar to the party’s trumpet, as well as dummy candidates against SS(UBT) candidates.
Political leadership within the state has historically been dominated by the Maratha community, who, despite numbering only 30 percent of Maharashtra, have contributed 12 of the 18 chief ministers. Besides their over-representation in land ownership, Maratha leaders have frequently led the state’s extensive cooperative movement—particularly in the sugar, dairy and banking sectors of the Paschim Maharashtra region—distributing economic benefits and opportunities within their communities and building extensive patronage networks to farmers, workers, and local businesses. The community has remained the backbone of the Shiv Sena, which has historically done better in the Mumbai and Konkan belts, and the NCP in Paschim Maharashtra.
However, as Mahale reported, frequent droughts, farmers’ suicides and the full-scale agrarian crisis they indicate have pushed many of the poor from the community—particularly in the Marathawada region bordering Karnataka—to rally behind a movement demanding the inclusion of Marathas to the state’s Other Backward Classes list. The impact of this was felt earlier in this year, when all but one of the seats was lost by the Mahayuti, which had been at the receiving end of much of the anger of Maratha reservation agitation and its leader Manoj Jarange Patil. Both parties have made tepid promises to ensure Maratha reservation, but neither are likely to push it past the courts.
To balance out this loss of support the Mahayuti leadership has been wooing OBC communities, listing seven castes in the central OBC list and raising the creamy-layer ceiling from an annual income of Rs 8 lakh to 12 lakh. Besides these seven communities—among the state’s wide array of 341 OBC castes and sub-castes accounting for over thirty eight percent of Maharashtra’s population—the BJP also enjoys the traditional support of BJP populous OBC groups, such as the Malli, Dhangar and Vanjari communities. It has also begun micro targeting OBC groups in a system similar to what it employed to win Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. Most of the communities, irrespective of their strength in the state’s population, have not had political representation in the past six to seven decades. The BJP has also perennially enjoyed a majority of the support of the upper castes, the most consistent vote bank of any party nationally.
It is largely a coalition of OBC and upper-caste groups that led BJP to win Vidharba, despite it being a centre of Ambedkarite politics with a long history of anti-caste assertion. Many Dalit communities supported the MVA alliance during the Lok Sabha polls, Rahul Pradhan, the founder of the Yuva Panthers—a Nanded-based Ambedkarite organisation—told The Caravan’s Ryan Thomas in an interview. But he cautioned that the plank of that campaign was saving the Constitution, one that might not extend to the state elections. Pradhan suggested much of this support could return to older Ambedkarite fronts such as the Vanchit Bahujan Aaghadi. Following the breaking of an electorally successful alliance with the AIMIM in 2019, the VBA has adapted its strategy from trying to consolidate Dalit and Muslim votes. In its declared seats, Muslims and Mahar Buddhists dominate the candidatures, with a few exceptions from other communities.
The Ambedkarite political space is further crowded, though, by the BSP, various factions of the Republican Party of India, and the new entrant Azad Samaj Party (Kanshiram). The Shinde government’s creation of a committee to look into sub-categorising the Scheduled Caste category—mere weeks after the Supreme Court allowed it and after the BJP saw its successes as an electoral strategy in Haryana—is seen as an attempt to draw support from Maharashtra’s non-Buddhist Dalit communities, who make up about half of the state’s 12-percent SC population. Cutting across many of these communities is the RSS, which, after a lacklustre campaigning during the Lok Sabha polls, has been seen in an active campaigning role this time around.
Election History
Between the 1960s and 1990s, the Congress—or its largest frequent rebel, Sharad Pawar—maintained control over the state, drawing much of its support and its regional leadership from the landed Maratha community. However, with the emergence of the strident Hindu-nationalist BJP and the local Shiv Sena, which blended the former’s ideology with Marathi nationalism, the Congress was first defeated in 1995. After the first Shiv Sena led government, the Congress and the NCP ruled for a full fifteen years under three Maratha chief ministers and a brief term under Sushilkumar Shinde, one of the party’s senior-most Dalit leaders in the state.
The 2014 election marked the beginning of a new era in the state’s politics because the four major parties stood independent of each other, laying down the old system of alliances. It was the first time each party could judge their own strength. Soon after the Lok Sabha polls that took Modi to New Delhi, the BJP pulled off an impressive win in Maharashtra, bagging 122 of the state’s 288 seats, with a voteshare of 27.81. The Shiv Sena, Congress and NCP polled 19.35, 17.95 and 17.24 percent of the vote.
The BJP’s biggest gains came from Vidharba, the arid and culturally distinct region to the state’s far-east, more than doubling their tally to 44 seats. The region and its centre, Nagpur, has since been vital to the party, with much of its top leadership coming from there, including Devendra Fadnavis, who became chief minister that year with the support of the Sena. (The NCP leadership had reached out to the BJP for an alliance but they were not accepted.)
Following five years of Fadnavis’s rule, in 2019, with all four parties having marginally lost voteshare—between 2.09 and 0.5 percent—the NCP emerged the biggest winner, adding 13 seats to its 2014 tally. The BJP won 105 seats, while the Sena got 56, the NCP 54 and the Congress 44.
In the chaos that followed the results, a new coalition uniting the Shiv Sena, NCP and the Congress was formed. Fadnavis attempted to form a government with support from Ajit Pawar, but when the NCP leadership and Sharad Pawar opposed the plan, the present MVA alliance formed the government under the leadership of Uddhav Thackeray.
However, in June 2022, the Shiv Sena split brought the BJP back into government with Shinde as the chief minister and Fadnavis as the deputy chief minister. Almost a year later, in July 2023, the NCP split with Ajit Pawar and legislators that followed him joining the government.
The fact that the past five years has seen roughly half of it ruled by the MVA and half by the Mahayuti means anti-incumbency is unlikely to be very strong, as the most recent CSDS-Lokniti survey suggests. A majority of those polled in the survey said the Mahayuti government better managed hospitals, the supply of electricity, drinking water and roads.
Despite the 2024 Lok Sabha polls throwing up a major victory for the MVA just months ago, a closer scrutiny of election data shows that the battle was very close. The MVA’s total voteshare, at 43.92 percent, is only marginally more than the Mahayuti’s 43.34 percent. It is also visible that in regions where the Mahayuti did well, such as Mumbai, the Konkan coast and Khandesh—which marks the state’s northern border with Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh—it won by large margins. The MVA victories across the state were hard fought, with slender margins, which could be upset easily by local politics and third parties.
If broken down to state segments, the Lok Sabha results suggest the BJP won just 78 seats, while the Shiv Sena won 40, the NCP 4, the Congress 63, the SS (UBT) 57 and the NCP (SP) 33. In each subsequent phase of the Lok Sabha polls the Mahayuti’s voteshare fell. This is likely the reason behind the enormous state being assigned a single phase of polling this time, by the ECI.
The two biggest voteshare gains during the Lok Sabha polls were for the BJP in Khandesh—where it made a 7.3-percent gain as a result of Adivasi and OBC outreach—and the Congress’s in Vidharba, where its vote share increased by 6.6 percent.
The BJP’s gains in Khandesh might not be as easy to maintain despite its growing OBC consolidation. Like in Marathawada and Vidharba, here, too, agrarian distress remains a major concern that could have an anti-incumbent effect. This is more likely because rural areas tend to vote more against the BJP in the state in any case, and because the BJP is stuck walking a thin line between better prices for farmers and curbing food inflation, which remains a major concern for its urban voter base. Low prices of soybean, cotton, maize and onions have pushed farmers in these regions in dire straits. It is unsurprising, then, that the region has seen the main thrust of the BJP’s Hindutva mobilisation, with Modi kicking off his Maharashtra campaign in Khandesh’s Nashik and Dhule with the slogan “Ek hain toh safe hain”—we are safe when we are united—an allusion to Muslims being a threat to a disunited Hindu community. The campaign grew only further Islamophobic when Uttar Pradesh’s chief minister Ajay Singh Bisht—popularly called Yogi Adityanath—added the slogan “Batenge toh katenge”—if we are divided, we shall be attacked.
Issues
Unemployment and agrarian distress are a consistent concern across the state, as they have been in several previous elections. There are almost 18 Lok Sabha constituencies in Maharashtra where cotton and soyabean were the decisive issues, all of which the Mahayuti lost. On 30 September, Shinde’s government distributed Rs 2,500 crore to 65 lakh farmers as part of a scheme to cover the gap between MSP and the market price, but the price for crops has only continued to fall since. However, given that much of the state’s agrarian population comes from the OBC, Dalit and Maratha communities, the anger and discontentment could find a complicated expression due to the caste consolidation occurring across the state across castes.
While agrarian issues may be restricted to the 189 rural seats of Maharashtra’s 288 tally, unemployment is a wider phenomenon that would affect urban voters too. The unemployment rate for persons with a college degree in the state was 13 percent in rural areas and 7.6 percent in urban areas, according to the Economic Survey of Maharashtra 2023-2024. The CSDS-Lokniti survey notes that nearly a quarter of the state’s voters cited unemployment as the single largest electoral issue. Understanding the importance of this bloc, Sharad Pawar has met protesting Maharashtra Public Services Commission exam candidates multiple times, while Ajit Pawar and Fadnavis have aligned themselves with youth demonstrations.
Tied to the issue of unemployment is the concern that many industries that were scheduled to be opened in Maharashtra have shifted base to Gujarat. This has become a major poll plank of the MVA, particularly the SS (UBT), given that anti-Gujarati sentiment was a core issue since the formation of the state. In Mumbai, a major poll plank of the MVA is the handing of redevelopment contracts for Dharavi, one of the largest slum clusters in the world, to Adani—a Gujarati industrialist with close links to Modi. The MVA has alleged that unfair concessions were given to Adani. It has also raised the issue of displacement of Dharavi’s residents. On 30 September, Shinde’s cabinet approved the utilisation of 255 acres of salt pan land in Mumbai to house the project-affected residents of Dharavi.
The CSDS-Lokniti survey suggested that 42 percent of polled electors believed that corruption had worsened under the Mahayuti, but that most voters did not hold that as a high priority when voting, and still appreciated the Mahayuti’s performance in welfare and governance. The survey’s findings might not, however, affect voting day decisions, as, just a day before voting, BJP’s national general secretary, Vinod Tawde, was booked for distributing money to voters out of a hotel, from which election officials recovered Rs 9.93 lakh.
Facing consistent criticism and a poor performance earlier this year, the Mahayuti have primarily followed two strategies. The BJP itself has run a deeply communal campaign alongside the microtargeting of smaller caste groups. Leaders such as Fadnavis have been campaigning against what they called “Vote Jihad,” a spurious claim that Muslims—including Muslim non-citizen migrants—conspiratorially consolidated against the BJP and brought about its poor performance in the Lok Sabha polls. The study that BJP leaders cited for this claim is not well substantiated and both its methodology and findings are opaque. This rhetoric is what Modi and Adityanath transformed into “Ek hain toh safe hain” and “Batenge toh katenge.” Attempting to link this to its Bahujan outreach, union home minister Amit Shah, among other BJP leaders, claim that the MVA intends to give Muslims reservation from the categories allotted to OBCs, SCs and STs, a fabrication they had aired during the Lok Sabha campaign too.
NCP leaders have tried to distance themselves from the BJP’s rhetoric, instead focusing on what would be their biggest advantage: welfare schemes. The timing of the election suggests this was the keystone of their campaign, with the Maharashtra polls being postponed from its usual timing alongside Haryana and Jammu and Kashmir, to allow the government to implement several schemes and its effects to the felt by voters. The CSDS-Lokniti survey suggests that few voters were aware of the state’s Balasaheb Thackeray Aapla Dawakhana, the Kisan Mitra Urja Yojana and the Mahasamruddhi Mahila Sashaktikaran Yojana—to address primary healthcare, farmers’ dependence on diesel and property registration for women—and even beneficiaries were not more likely to vote for the Mahayuti. The same held true for union government schemes such as the Ujjwala Yojana and Ayushman Bharat—pertaining to subsidised LPG connections and health insurance for low-income groups.
The single scheme that has seemed to have a wider impact is the Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana. Women between the ages of 21 and 65 and earning less than Rs 2.5 lakh a year—around 2.34 crore women across the state—are eligible to receive direct cash transfers of Rs 1,500 every month. Before the current polling, a majority of these women have received Rs 7,500 already. Given that similar schemes found significant success in states such as Madhya Pradesh, and that Maharashtra is one of the only states where fewer women vote than men—a significant 5-percent difference—Ladki Bahin could give a substantial fillip to the Mahayuti. Seeing the success of the scheme, both the MVA and Mahayuti have said they would increase direct cash transfers under the scheme.
All of these complex and often contradictory factors make any election in India’s second-most populous state nearly impossible to predict. The only consolation for election watchers is that, regardless of how the two alliances poll, there is no guarantee that the two alliance blocks will stay together over the next month, given that they lack any ideological glue and that many of the same players have frequently switched sides during formations of the government over the past few years.