TeaPointing to the state witnessing 1,192 communal clashes from 1998 to 2008, the highest in the country, in which 172 people lost their lives. Think of India’s financial capital, which witnessed 83 communal riots during 1908-2009, in which 1,900 people died and more than 8,000 were injured.
Just remember these figures of an officer Study Socio-economic profile of Muslims in Maharashtra. I’ll be back on it shortly.
Maharashtra’s ‘V’ for nowIkash’ Or development – Devendra Fadnavis. It was unlike Fadnavis to blame the state home minister’s “Aurangzeb ki aulad” (descendants of Aurangzeb) for Kolhapur’s communal tension. As the Chief Minister of Maharashtra from 2014 to 2019, he has never been seen as a polarizing figure. His focus was on infrastructure – from expediting and expanding the UPA-era project of metro lines in Mumbai, the Coastal Road, the Trans-Harbour Link, the Mumbai-Nagpur Expressway, etc. In January 2018, he announced that Maharashtra plans to join the trillion-dollar GSDP (Gross State Domestic Product) league in the next 7-10 years. “Businesses can guarantee that nobody is harassing them. And that is the strength of Maharashtra. The Times of India Quoted Saying before an investment summit.
Those were the days when Maharashtrians and many people outside the state were enjoying everything Fadnavis said. Adityanath was yet to be ‘made’development guy‘ that he became in his second term as CM of Uttar Pradesh. And Himanta Biswa Sarma was yet to become the Chief Minister of Assam. Fadnavis was then in a league of his own, with many in the BJP and even the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) seeing him as a potential prime minister. The traders had vowed that no one would bother them then.
Until Fadnavis took political center stage as chief minister, Nitin Gadkari was the BJP’s poster boy in Maharashtra, credited with the Mumbai-Pune Expressway as the Public Works Development Minister. He had the ability to knock out Dhirubhai Ambani’s lowest bid of Rs 3,600 crore and he bet Told the industrialist that if the expressway is not built at half the cost, he will shave off his moustache. It cost Rs 1,600 crore and Gadkari, also known as Mumbai’s ‘flyover man’, saved his moustache.
In Fadnavis, the BJP found a new poster boy as the then Maharashtra chief minister was expediting and completing long-pending infrastructure projects and taking up new ventures. Only the second Brahmin chief minister of Maharashtra—Manohar Joshi is the first—where Brahmins are estimated to be barely three percent of the population, Fadnavis was seen as a political lightweight when Prime Minister Narendra Modi made him chief minister in 2014. In fact, he was part of Modi’s larger political experiment that year—ignoring politically dominant communities in states that together outnumber dominant groups in order to appoint chief ministers from less influential groups. As a counter-polarizing concept, it was brilliant – a Khatri in Jat-dominated Haryana, a Brahmin in Maharashtra and a Vaish in Adivasi-dominated Jharkhand. Jharkhand’s experiment failed after five years. So could BJP not get majority on its own in the form of Haryana? Although it worked in Maharashtra. BJP-Shiv Sena together secured a substantial majority but the BJP high command allowed Shiv Sena to go into the opposition camp. But by 2019, Fadnavis was an established leader with a mass appeal. I traveled to Maharashtra for the 2019 assembly elections. People may have a grudge against the BJP on poverty, unemployment and other issues, but they saw Fadnavis as a hard worker.
At 52, Fadnavis is the tallest BJP leader in Maharashtra and one of very few tall leaders in the BJP after PM Modi—the others being Adityanath, Himanta Sarma, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Vasundhara Raje. So, what has happened to the promising young, liberal, modern face of the BJP in Maharashtra? Why does he have to remember Aurangzeb now?
Read also: Why Devendra Fadnavis of 2022 is not like 2014
turn to hinduism
At a time when posts by individual people on social media are fueling communal sentiments in several districts of Maharashtra, why is the state home minister making his job difficult with the “son of Aurangzeb” remark? This also brings us to the figures mentioned in the first paragraph. In a state with a history of communal strife, why would Fadnavis, a leader who wanted to make Maharashtra a trillion-dollar economy, spoil the investment climate with inflammatory comments?
His opponents in the party see it as a diversionary tactic – to divert attention Scandal In which his wife Amrita is also included. She had lodged an FIR against her designer ‘friend’ Aniksha Jaisinghani alleging bribery and attempted blackmail. It took the Mumbai Police five weeks to arrest the accused, who was released on bail only 11 days after his arrest.
For someone who allegedly tried to bribe and blackmail the wife of a Deputy CM-Home Minister, Aneksha certainly got lucky with the police investigation and the court. BJP and RSS leaders are watching this matter very keenly.
However, it is wrong to see Fadnavis as a new Avatar With reference to recent developments. His efforts to build an image – from infrastructure man to Hindutva icon – have been noticeable over a period of time. In March, he announced that the state government was considering enacting a law on “love jihad”.
Last month, he had ordered the formation of a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the alleged chadar offering by the Muslim community at Nashik’s Trimbakeshwar temple. muslim leader Said That this ritual of showing frankincense from the entrance of the temple has been going on for decades and refused to enter the temple or put any chadar.
In September 2021, amid the COVID-19 crisis, Fadnavis in the then opposition bullied If the government does not give permission, they will forcibly open the temple.
His biggest pitch as a staunch Hindutva leader came in May 2022 when he announced at a party rally in Mumbai, informed of By Hindustan Times: “Those who are afraid of removing loudspeakers from mosques are asking where were we when the Babri Masjid was demolished? I am proud to say that I was a part of the demolition of Babri Masjid. Devendra Fadnavis was present on the occasion. Earlier, I was also lodged in Badaun Central Jail for 18 days during Kar Sewa.
It is about two months before he returns to power as Deputy Chief Minister.
what does this change indicate
There could be three reasons for the way Fadnavis is trying to change his image. Firstly, with Uddhav Thackeray joining the so-called secular camp, it is an opportunity for the BJP to try to completely usurp the Hindutva space, including the political and ideological legacy of Bal Thackeray. For this it may need an ally in the form of Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena today, but eventually the BJP will have to emerge as the sole reservoir of Hindutva in Maharashtra as well. This may explain Fadnavis’ hard right turn.
The second explanation may be the need for polarisation, given the almost frozen votebanks of various parties, which seem to be giving an edge to the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) – an alliance of the Congress, Uddhav Thackeray’s forces and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). . Look at the results of the last five assembly elections. The worst voteshare of any of the three MVA partners today is 16 per cent. In the 2019 assembly elections, Shiv Sena got 16.41 percent, Congress 15.87 percent and NCP 16.71 percent votes. This was the worst performance of the Congress in terms of vote share. It was also almost the worst for the other two, but not technically. In 2009, Shiv Sena got 16.26 percent and NCP got 16.37 percent votes.
The long and short of it is that the MVA gets about 48 percent of the vote, marking its worst performance in elections in the last 25 years. The only relief for the BJP here is that (Shinde’s) official Shiv Sena is now with it. Hence, BJP optimists believe that Shiv Sena’s 16 per cent vote bank (as of 2019) has completely shifted to Shinde. For the sake of convenience, let us assume that the BJP has 28 per cent votes in Maharashtra. I have chosen this figure because the BJP got 27.82 per cent votes in the 2014 assembly elections – the best ever – when it contested alone. The BJP will then need Shinde’s army to win over most of the erstwhile Shiv Sena voters to the NDA fold. For the time being put aside the vote share of Shiv Sena. Even with their worst performance, hypothetically, the Congress and the NCP would command a combined vote share of 32 per cent. The BJP’s best performance was 28 per cent. This shows how much the BJP should rely on Eknath Shinde to deliver results.
Anyway, there are many doubts in the BJP camp. as I mentioned in my column Last month, a senior BJP leader was seen at a party meeting in Mumbai trying to tell Amit Shah how Shiv Sainiks were not changing their allegiance to Shinde’s party.
He was a confidant of leader Devendra Fadnavis. This should explain the Maharashtra Deputy CM’s efforts to consolidate the Hindutva votebank.
However, there could be a third explanation for Fadnavis’ attempt at an image change. Despite all his achievements as Chief Minister and showing his political acumen by breaking the Shiv Sena, he has not got the support of the BJP high command. In 2019, Delhi made little effort to try and persuade Uddhav Thackeray to form the government. And when he split the Shiv Sena and brought down the government, the high command reduced his stature by removing him as deputy CM. He may have observed that chief ministers who follow staunch Hindutva have a better chance of winning the confidence of the high command – from Himanta Biswa Sarma in Assam to Manohar Lal Khattar in Haryana and Pushkar Dhami in Uttarakhand. Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had to shed his moderate image to buy peace with the bosses in Delhi. Uttar Pradesh’s Adityanath is working hard to shed his past image as a hardliner and emerge as a completely development-oriented chief minister. Adityanath can afford to because he has become too big for the high command to interfere with. Fadnavis is not there now. And so he should try to turn back time, first by emerging as a Hindutva fanatic and then by polishing his image as a leader who dreams of making Maharashtra a trillion-dollar economy.
DK Singh is the political editor of ThePrint. Thoughts are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)