Maharashtra polls: Voters' loyalties put to test after BJP-Shiv Sena & Congress-NCP split

BARAMATI, KARAD SOUTH, CHIPLUN: It has been just less then four days since the two main political alliances in Maharashtra have broken ahead of the assembly election on October 15 when we reach Baramati, the Pawar family fiefdom in Pune district of western Maharashtra.
Naturally, the city is yet to be gripped by political fervour. There are no posters or banners carrying candidates’ oversized visages, and not too many campaign vehicles with speakers hollering their praises.

But as we stop for tea, it is evident that people can’t have enough of discussing the election as a group intersperses its conversation with glances at their newspapers and slurpy sips of tea. “Is baar toh maza aayega,” says one of them, alluding to the challenge posed to the Pawars’ Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) from three other major parties — its former partner, the Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Shiv Sena.

Pawar Power

The new political scenario does not bother Kiran Gujar, a Pawar family aide in Baramati, which is on the state’s sugar belt. “Other parties just put up candidates for the heck of it. None of them stands a chance of winning. Everyone knows that,” he says, smiling.

Hyperbole aside, it seems a herculean task to dislodge the Pawars here. Sharad Pawar, co-founder of the NCP and a Maratha strongman, and his nephew and till recently deputy chief minister of the state, Ajit Pawar, have held the Baramati assembly seat for a staggering 47 years (Ajit has won since 1991).

In the past two elections, in 2004 and 2009, Ajit, referred to as ‘Dada’, got over two-thirds of the votes. His cousin and Pawar’s daughter, Supriya Sule, won the Baramati Lok Sabha constituency in 2009 and 2014, after her father vacated the seat he had held since 1991 for the Madha constituency.


The confidence in Gujar’s tone wanes when asked if he was as so sure before the alliances broke, as he admits that the NCP would have not had as easy a ride to victory had the BJP and the Shiv Sena stuck together.

According to him, the Pawars, who wield significant influence over western Maharashtra’s sugar co-operatives, have a tradition of not canvassing in their constituency, returning only on the last day of campaigning after filing their nomination.

Balasaheb Gawde, the BJP candidate in Baramati, is certain of his win, thanks to his alliance partners, Vinayak Mete’s Shiv Sangram, a Maratha organization; Ramdas Athavale’s Republican Party of India, a Dalit party; Mahadev Jankar’s Rashtriya Samaj Paksha, an other backward classes (OBC)-scheduled tribes (ST) party; and Raju Shetti’s Swabhimani Paksha, whose vote bank is farmers. The Shiv Sena, which was part of the ‘Mahayuti’ till last week, is now fighting it alone.

While steering Marathas, the largest community in the region, away from the NCP in Baramati may not be easy, the BJPled combine will look to tap into the votes of the Dhangar community (shepherds).

Along with the Modi factor, Dhangars played a key role in Jankar, who belongs to that community, giving a scare to Sule in the 2014 general election, bringing down Sule’s victory margin to just 70,000 votes from 3.37 lakh votes in 2009.

Besides caste, water scarcity is the biggest issue in the election. Baramati could be the envy of small cities across the country in that it has a 130-acre campus with schools, engineering, law and biotechnology colleges run by the Pawars’ Vidya Pratishthan, and also companies like Bharat Forge in the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC) cluster.

The villages near Baramati, however, are a different story. Ramesh Kupwal, a resident of Supa village, says more than half of the 117 villages in the constituency are dry:

“We get water only during the election. Forget water for land, there is no water for household use.” Sugarcane, a waterguzzling crop, accounts for over a fourth of the total farm land.

A drive through the villages is enough to illustrate the magnitude of the scarcity. Almost every house has three to four water cans of different sizes and, in some cases, a large tank in which the residents fill the water they get once in three days. Ajit’s opponents, including Shiv Sena’s Rajendra Kale and Akash More of the Congress, are likely to bring up Ajit’s remarks in Indapur, near Baramati, in April 2013, in response to a Solapur farmer’s strike, demanding more water.





“If there is no water in the dam, how can we release it? Should we urinate into it? If there is no water to drink, even urination is not possible,” Ajit had said. He later apologised for the remark.

They also allude to allegations of corruption in the awarding of irrigation projects against Ajit during his term as water resources minister which forced him to resign as deputy CM in 2012; he was reinstated a few weeks later after a white paper denied these allegations. Ajit has a tougher fight on his hands than usual but he is still very much the man to beat in Baramati.

Chavan’s Challenges

About 150 km south of Baramati, former CM Prithviraj Chavan is facing a battle of a different kind. Debuting in assembly elections from the Karad South constituency of his hometown, Chavan cannot afford to be as confident as Ajit.

After all, he is taking on a candidate who was till recently his colleague and has won from this constituency seven consecutive times since 1980. Vilasrao Patil Undalkar, commonly referred to as ‘Kaka’ here, refused to yield to the Congress high command’s directive to give up his seat for Chavan, for whom he has no love lost, and is now fighting as an independent.

“Chavan is like a foreigner here, his work here is zero,” says Undalkar. The 76-year-old, who lives in a modest house, is a household name in Karad and draws crowds wherever he goes. His supporters say he was never one to talk to the media as he did not care about publicity. “But now, because of Chavan, everyone knows about Kaka. There is no way Kaka is going to lose,” says one of them. The NCP has pulled out of the race in support of Undalkar, but its candidate Rajendra Yadav has joined the Chavan camp.

Chavan, whose parents also represented Karad in the Lok Sabha, is a three-time MP from the constituency, but hasn’t fought an election since he lost in 1999. He admits that fighting his first election in 15 years and having to oversee his party’s campaign across the state are among his challenges to winning this election.

“People have aged and some of my colleagues have passed away and I may not know their children directly. I’m rebuilding those contacts,” he says in a brief interview in his car between campaign stops in villages in his constituency. (See “I didn’t want to contest from a safe seat…”) Undalkar is not the only former Congressman that Chavan is facing in the election.

Atul Bhosale, who switched over from the Congress to the BJP on September 24, is leading a spirited campaign, banking on the 5,000 people his sugar and textile factories employ in the constituency. His family also controls a co-operative bank, and runs schools and colleges, which Bhosale claims have 25,000 students.

“There is going to be a Chavan and Kaka and we will benefit from that,” says the 31-year-old, who dismisses the prospects of the Shiv Sena candidate Ajeenkya Patil, son of Bihar governor DY Patil.

Vijay Patil (no relation), who works in a hotel in Karad, expects Chavan to win because of his chief ministerial stint, but he says Bhosale has a lot of backers, too. “Though I’m a Shiv Sena supporter, I know they have no base here.”

The Modi Factor

The Shiv Sena need not worry about its base in Chiplun in Ratnagiri district in the Konkan region, a constituency it has won in every election since 1990, except 2004, when the NCP succeeded. The party’s candidate and sitting MLA, Sadanand Chavan, says while workers of his party and the BJP are unhappy with their split, he is not worried about its impact on his votes.

The BJP lacks a base here and has always lived in the Shiv Sena’s shadow. Chiplun is a vast assembly constituency in terms of its area since it also comprises the Sangameshwar tehsil which is about 50 km from Chiplun. While the real fight here is expected to be between Sadanand and the NCP’s Shekhar Nikam, the BJP, whose candidate is Madhav Gavli, is banking on the Modi factor.
“The Shiv Sena used to talk about winning with a margin of 40,000 votes but now they are talking of a margin of just 8,000-10,000 votes. We are gaining momentum and we have made a request to the party that Modiji hold a rally here. That will make a huge difference,” says a party worker. Gavli says people think the same party should be in power both at the Centre and the state which will swing the results on October 19 in the BJP’s favour.

An opinion poll conducted by ABP News and Nielsen in July and August said if all the major parties were to go it alone, the BJP would get 112 seats, the Shiv Sena 62 seats, the Congress 45, the NCP 38, and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena 11, out of the total 288 seats.

But this was before the drubbing the BJP got in the by-poll results in 10 states on September 16. While Baramati and Chiplun may not be as closely-fought as Karad South, if there is one thing elections have shown us in the past, it is that a party’s strongholds do not always remain so and it might not be a stretch to expect the unexpected.