BJP-NCP: Secret Deal ?

By Deepak Parvatiyar

November 17, 2014

One man’s loss is another man’s gain! The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) has gained as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) antagonised the Shiv Sena over the issue of share in the government.

Discredited and doomed before the Maharashtra Assembly elections, the NCP grabbed its chances and catapulted itself into the position of kingmaker in the state with some smart decisions such as severing all ties with the Congress before the state elections and thereafter, lending unconditional support to the BJP that fell short of majority in the state and was being arm-twisted by a demanding Sena.

NCP: From Marginal Player to Kingmaker

From being completely written off, the NCP has rather scripted a great comeback on the Maharashtra political scene under Sharad Pawar. Consider how the NCP had been outrightly dismissed in the pre-poll surveys by the pollsters. There was no succour post-election either. The party performance was expectedly dismal in the fray as it could win just 41 Assembly seats (as against 62 seats in 2009). Indeed, it was a rather hopeless scenario for a Maharashtra-based and Maratha-led party!

There is an old saying – Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Who else than Pawar – a master tactician – knows it better? His party had won just four out of the total 48 seats from Maharashtra in the Lok Sabha elections of summer 2014 and the writing was very much on the wall.

So, wasn’t it the ripe time to move over to greener pastures for the NCP – a constituent of the erstwhile Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government (UPA) at the Centre? He had already started making overtures about a possible alliance to the BJP when his party supported crucial bills in the Rajya Sabha where the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government is in minority.

Can NCP-BJP relations last?

Pawar’s support to the BJP became more explicit after the Maharashtra polls as his party abstained from voting on the trust motion against the minority BJP government in the Maharashtra Assembly this week to save the day for the incumbent Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis.

Yet, can this political arrangement last? Indeed, it is inclusive of ideological cross-currents. Unlike the Sena – which takes pride in its perceived role of the torchbearer of Hindutva – the NCP never endorsed the BJP’s saffron politics.

So, what does the BJP taking the help of the NCP signify? Of course, it was the unilateral decision of the NCP supremo Pawar to lend support to the BJP after the fractured mandate in the state. To date, the BJP has preferred to maintain a studied silence on the issue of the unequivocal support of the NCP. How could it justify its complete U-turn after Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in the course of his Lok Sabha election campaigns, had branded the NCP as Naturally Corrupt Party?

BJP-Shiv Sena: Estranged but Natural Allies

Hankering after power by any means does eat up the ideological space of political parties and Maharashtra today is a testimony to this. Sena and the BJP are the latest examples of such expediency. Shouldn’t the present political uncertainty in Maharashtra, even as the state voted for Hindutva forces, be attributed to the precedence of greed over ideology? While the Sena continued to count chickens before they were hatched, the BJP turned a deaf ear to the Sena’s warning that it would sit in Opposition if the Lotus took the NCP’s support. Political brinkmanship was at full display thoroughly explaining the diabolical dynamics of coalition politics.

Estranged they may be but still the Sena and the BJP are ideologically aligned and thus a natural ally. Yet, both demanded a larger share of the pie and divorced before the elections. Many would have thought them to kiss and patch up after the fractured mandate where both had satisfied their respective ego by not yielding space to each other in the fray but the BJP scored a point over the Sena by winning much more seats than its alienated ally.

It is at this point that one is reminded of the story of the Judge Monkey! He ate the whole loaf of bread as two cats kept quarrelling demanding it to be distributed equally between both. The NCP’s intervention in the broken saffron family, has indeed further dented their relationship.

The Sena rues the fact that the BJP dumped it in favour of the NCP to form the government. It even dubbed the NCP a s a “mouse” that “nibbled at the state coffers”. “Will you take the support of the mouse?” the Sena mouthpiece, Samna, asked its estranged ally, the BJP, in an editorial.

Sharad Pawar: Beneficiary of BJP-Sena Disagreement

At hindsight, Pawar’s does seem a shrewd strategy to divide and rule. Yet, isn’t it a great survival tactic employed by the wily Maratha for whom time was simply running out in the face of a resurgent BJP riding the NaMo crescendo. The old warhorse, after all, is adept in switching gears. Remember how he had broken away from the Congress to form the NCP when an ‘Italian’ Sonia Gandhi defeated him in the contest for the Congress President’s post in the late nineties. Political expediency though brought both of them together again and NCP was a crucial ally of the Congress-led UPA government.

But can the BJP government count on the NCP to last a full term? We do have precedence when political compulsions led parties support a minority government only to pull the rug out at an opportune time. Remember how the Congress had supported the minority government of former prime minister (late) Chandrashekhar, only to withdraw its support on a flimsy ground triggering fresh elections in the country? Chandrashekhar, though, was himself a Congressman once. Fadnavis has nothing in common with Pawar! And that explains why politics in Maharashtra now borders on fragility after the elections.