Dilli mein Narendra, Mumbai mein Devendra

“Mi punha yein, yach nirdharan, yach bhumiket, yach thikani, Nav Maharashtrach nirmiti sathi”.

Above statement simply means “I will come again with the same foundation, in the same role, in the same place, to build a New Maharashtra.” On 2 July 2019, the incumbent CM ended the last assembly session of his first term with the above note. By now he had gone from a Modi-protege to Maharashtra’s most powerful and popular politician with a self-made base. Devendra Fadnavis is the frontrunner to win another term in the state, having waded through the highs and the lows of his first term, with consummate ease and distinction. Very few political observers would have been sceptical about this statement. But this wasn’t always the case. 

If in October 2014, political observers were asked to opine on the probability of a Brahmin Maharashtra chief minister from Vidarbha in his mid-40s with no cooperative movement link completing a full five-year term, the most common answer would have been “zero”. The last chief minister to complete his full five-year term in Maharashtra was Vasantrao Naik in 1972. Only one of the 17 chief ministers before Fadnavis was a Brahmin, Manohar Joshi of Shiv Sena. All previous chief ministers had a cooperative or local industrial base, which was their leverage in state politics. A Maratha chief minister from either Marathwada or Western Maharashtra area was the norm in state politics. Yet, the BJP trusted Fadnavis, not a novice, but certainly not a cookie-cutter template choice either. The odds facing Fadnavis were insurmountable — he faced opposition from within his party, from within his government and, of course, from the opposition.

Maharashtra is the economic engine of India, contributing almost 1/5^th of India’s gross domestic product (GDP) and attracting almost 50 per cent of all foreign direct investment (FDI) flowing into India in many years. Yet, politically, Maharashtra had been a cash cow, not a focal point of governance. Mumbai would get the fawning attention, but not the funds to invest in its crumbling infrastructure. Marathwada got several studies to understand how to deal with perennial water shortage but not many new ideas. Nagpur got a few projects mainly to ensure the Vidarbha statehood demand remained curbed, but not much in terms of connecting with the rest of the state. Fadnavis has managed to address several of these anomalies. Rather than getting bogged down by the various scenarios in which he may lose power, he leveraged his urban connect, a person-next-door image and his political vulnerability to create a brand associating himself with development and governance. He worked, talked about his work and got others to talk about his work.

The few big items that Fadnavis concentrated on are at different stages of taking shape. Over the next six years or so, Mumbai will complete a collection of projects Fadnavis has started or rejuvenated. All these projects are significantly standalone; collectively they will make Mumbai a very different city. Not yet Shanghai, but certainly the city Mumbai deserved to be a few decades ago, Mumbai will close gap with its own needs significantly. A 340-kilometre metro rail network will span across Mumbai, Thane and Navi Mumbai areas, making commuting in the city more comfortable and modern. An expanding suburban rail network will connect Mumbai with several towns in the Konkan region, opening access for job-seekers. The metro was first conceptualised in 1990s and the current plan was ready as early as 2005. A new airport will come up at Navi Mumbai. The new airport was first proposed in 1997. The Mumbai Trans-Harbour Link (MTHL) will connect South Mumbai to the mainland near Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust. The MTHL is being talked about since 1963. Successive state governments lacked the will and the conviction to see these projects through. The Fadnavis government is working on the ambitious, India’s longest expressway of 710 km Mumbai-Nagpur Samruddhi Mahamarg. With the project achieving full financial closure, the Vidarbha-Khandesh-Konkan connectivity will get a huge boost, opening new markets for farmers as well as industries. Along the highway, the government plans targeted industrial and residential clusters. His flagship Jalyukt Shivar Abhiyan has covered almost 17,000 villages. Constructing local water harvesting, storage and transporting projects has helped these villages reduce their dependency on rain as well as big dams. Maharashtra has also continued to attract domestic and foreign investments. Be it the factories of GE, Philips or Britannia or the retail expansion of Ikea, the state continues to benefit from a stable political environment and being the preferred migration destination of a skilled workforce. The proposed nuclear power plant in Jaitapur and the oil refinery in Raigad district also promise to add energy to the long list of industries in which Maharashtra leads the country. Devendra Fadnavis has articulated his dream of steering Maharashtra towards a $1-trillion economy. As India targets a $5-trillion economy, this target for Maharashtra makes eminent sense, with its share of GDP over the years. From the current $400-billion-odd levels, it will take 12 years of 8 per cent growth to achieve this feat. Fadnavis runs his government from Mumbai, India’s economic capital. While this brings great glamour to the job, it is a risk in itself. If the financial district of the Bandra-Kurla Complex sneezes, quite likely, Wall Street will catch a cold. If the factories in Chakan or the software firms in Hinjewadi are prevented from operating, global leaders may call New Delhi. This interdependency reflects the best of global economic integration; it also exposes the city to manipulation. Throwing normalcy out of gear even for a day or two can lead to increased global concern, if not panic. 

If Fadnavis is re-elected, he will continue to face opposition emanating from the caste fault-lines of the state. He had to work hard on ensuring that social schemes in the state didn’t snowball into large-scale violent protests. On many occasions, he had to use his personal political capital and goodwill to diffuse frayed sentiments. Given that Fadnavis implemented the long-standing demand of Maratha reservation, mobilisation of political opposition in the garb of social causes has become difficult. Additionally, the BJP has also fortified its Maratha leadership ranks. But the ‘Peshwai’ barbs thrown at Fadnavis will remain — a historic reference to the Brahmin Peshwas governing symbolically on behalf of the Maratha rulers, but in essence, edging them out of significance. Mumbai has the most diverse demographic make-up across all large cities in India. This diversity manifests itself in two ways — language and religion. In a Marathi-speaking state, created on linguistic basis, only 42 per cent residents of the capital city are native Marathi speakers. In terms of religion, Mumbai has 66 per cent Hindus, 21 per cent Muslims, 5 per cent Buddhists, 4 per cent Jains, 3 per cent Christians, and just less than 1 per cent Sikhs. It is also home to India’s largest population of Parsis, with 60,000 of them living in the city. While this linguistic and religious diversity has contributed immensely to Mumbai’s tenacity and progressive worldview, it sadly also has been a source of strife. No other Indian chief minister deals with this religious and linguistic diversity in his own capital city as the Chief Minister of Maharashtra. This is the complexity Fadnavis has managed in addition to checkmating his wily political opponents in Sharad Pawar, Raj Thackeray, Ashok Chavan and Prithviraj Chavan, and managing his tantrum-prone ally Shiv Sena. But this is an ongoing battle if he comes back to run Maharashtra. The expectations will only multiply if he is re-elected. The good news for the state is that after a long time, a chief minister is seeking votes in his own name and work.

A corporator at 24, mayor at 26, Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) at 28, Fadnavis has spent two decades now in the corridors of power in Mumbai. His no-nonsense, pro-development, less dogma and more action-orientation approach have served him well in his first term. Dilli mein Narendra, Mumbai mein Devendra — Narendra (Modi) in Delhi and Devendra (Fadnavis) in Mumbai, that’s the promise BJP has held out to the voters in Maharashtra. This time Fadnavis, now the tallest leader in Maharashtra with cross-caste acceptance and not just a budding Brahmin MLA from Vidarbha, will in all probability become the longest serving CM in the history of Maharashtra.

The Fourth Lal of Haryana

Haryanvis are, along with Biharis, among the most stereotyped people in the country. But more so, there are famous for their notorious dynasties. It is the land of ‘’Lals” and their lals(children). Devi Lal, Bansi Lal and Bhajan Lal are three most prominent former CMs who have left behind a legacy. BJP came to power in 2014 for the first time in the state riding on the coattails of Prime Minister Modi as well as due to anti-incumbency sentiment against a decade-long old government which had earned notoriety for being corrupt and focusing on only select pockets for development. A non-Jat became chief minister when BJP selected Manohar Lal Khattar — the fourth Lal — to head the government. He faced fierce opposition from outside the government and a muted resistance from within his party’s state unit. Barring a few in Sangh circles, he wasn’t well known even in the BJP let alone among the masses who hadn’t heard of him before the election. Everyone was betting against him and wishing for him to stumble, fail and fall. He did fail. Repeatedly. At least that’s how everyone saw it. Soon after assuming charge, he came under fire for how his government handled violent followers of Rampal who had defied court orders of arrest and was hiding in his ashram in Hisar. In early 2016, the Jat reservation movement which turned violent and claimed more than 30 lives, almost did him in. Chief Minister Khattar had barely recovered from that, when the mayhem unleashed by followers of Dera Sacha Sauda in Panchkula in early 2018 again seemed to prove his detractors right. They again bayed for his blood. But the party bosses in Delhi kept their faith in Khattar. Until last year, Khattar didn’t seem to be in control. The only thing that was going in his favour was his clean image. He had put an end to all kinds of corruption, which Haryana was infamous for. But it wasn’t enough. In fact, it was proving counter-productive especially among the party cadre. Given the lack of ideological or party loyalty, leaders and people flock to a party in the hope they will get personal favours when in power. But Chief Minister Khattar was in no mood to dole out government jobs to the party faithful or even entertain requests from ministers or his MLAs for transfers or contracts for their loyalists.

But soon Khattar’s fortunes took a turn for the better. In December 2018, BJP swept mayoral polls in five big municipalities of Rohtak, Hisar, Karnal, Panipat and Yamunanagar. It was truly an inflection point. Those who were sure that Chief Minister Khattar will be a one-term wonder, started realising the gravity of one past incident. It dawned on them how gravely the violence during Jat quota agitation has polarised the state even in areas where Jats had minimal presence. One month later, it won the Jind by-poll with a huge margin in Jat heartland. It fielded a non-Jat against Jat candidates ran by Chautalas and Congress. The demographics did the rest. But it wasn’t just that. Yes, polarisation was the biggest factor but there was more, something which analysts had also overlooked. Khattar’s war on corruption may have been resented by his own party men the most but it was starting to bear fruit on the ground. Just before the Jind election, the state government announced results for 18,000 Group-D jobs and Jind came third with over 1,600 applicants qualifying. In fact, the areas which bagged the most number of jobs were not BJP strongholds. The party had lost there in 2014. This proved to the people that the jobs were being given in a transparent manner. In his five-year tenure, Khattar government has given more sarkari jobs than what the state governments of Hooda and Chautalas did in the last 15 years before 2014. How could no one, from the shrewdest seasoned politicians to wily political operatives who stayed in power for years, crack this easy puzzle: that this could work wonders in a state crazy for sarkari jobs? It took a novice like Khattar to understand its importance. Because these vacancies are filled in a totally transparent manner, people from lower and poor sections of the society have benefitted the most. With bribe culture gone and merit the criterion, students have started focusing on studying rather than worrying about arranging money for cooling palms of corrupt middlemen or running behind politicians wasting time. Coaching classes are coming up everywhere. The amount of goodwill Khattar has earned among masses with just one move, especially among the youth, has only one parallel that I can think of: when Devi Lal had started monthly pension for the old-age folks in 1977. Khattar has also ended the culture of regionalism — favouring one’s hometown district or those areas which vote for you — over others. When people see public works being done in constituencies which didn’t vote for the BJP in 2014, it strikes them as something of an alien concept. Now, there is no waiting for someone from your area to become chief minister to see vikas. A close friend working these days with Government in Haryana who was especially biased against the ruling party, was recently praising it for the implementation of iconic Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao scheme. I was smiling. And so is Manohar Lal.

While the ‘Aaya Ram, Gaya Ram’ culture is alive and kicking, Chief Minister Khattar has introduced a new governance model to Haryanvis: free of corruption and graft, which works for all parts of the state’s citizens based on their needs and not on their political affiliations. It is due to this culture that those politicians, especially dynasties, which thrived on regionalism or personal loyalties, have been dealt a body blow. Most importantly, he has rid the state government of image where it was seen to be run by the real estate tycoons. No wonder that Khattar is all set to return for a second term and this time with an even much bigger majority. The opposition is merely fighting for relevance, not to win. Of course, the BJP has been able to achieve it all by polarising the state along Jat-non-Jat lines, however strongly it may deny that fact. This has been the price that the state has paid for Chief Minister Khattar’s good governance. He has cleaned up a lot of mess, but Haryana has got infected with this deadly virus like never. One hopes that in the next five years, the state gets itself rid of this poison of caste tensions and rises to new highs. There are signs all over that this caste tension has reduced significantly in recent times with Jats voting openly for BJP in recently concluded General Elections, where the saffron party won all 10 Lok Sabha seats. Including the Jatland seats of Hisar, Rohtak and Sonipat.

The Masterclass of Dominant vs The Others

Ordinarily, if the country is less than a few months away from three assembly elections, particularly if a state as significant as Maharashtra is among them, one can expect a fair bit of buzz building up in the political and media circles. If past trends are anything to go by, now would roughly be the time when a few theatre-turned-cinema artistes would begin to write a letter or two decrying some perceived injustice or the other and a few other ‘eminent historians’ and ‘public intellectuals’ would return some of the awards that they had won during more ‘secular’ times. Thankfully, the nation has been spared such theatrics this time around. Even the major political opposition party, the Congress, has restricted its attacks to acerbic missiles around the state of the economy and has not really shown any inclination to get its hands fully dirty. The internal turbulence in the opposition and fairly clear verdicts from all the three states in the general election have made the opposition and its larger ecosystem almost concede defeat to the BJP.

However, for those interested in a more than casual analysis, the elections of Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand will represent a critical step in the political project that the BJP, under the Modi-Shah duo, has effected in the country over the last five years. The genesis of this initiative can be said to have been in the state of Uttar Pradesh, in the run-up to the 2014 general election, when Amit Shah was sent to the heartland as its state in-charge. In UP, Shah managed to revive his party in a spectacular fashion, by winning it 71 of the state’s 80 seats. He did this by orchestrating a rainbow coalition of castes --- prizing away micro-castes (non-Yadav OBCs and non-Jatav Dalits) from their larger caste groupings and adding them onto the already existing social alliances of the BJP. Of course, he was helped by the image and oratory of Narendra Modi but at the end of the 2014 general election, it was evident that, as an electoral strategy, Shah’s plan of creating a social coalition of non-dominant castes had worked.

The elections of Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Haryana quickly followed and the strategy was replicated in all three. It needs to be noted that in all these states, the BJP had been in power only intermittently and never on its own strength. The polity of Maharashtra had come to be dominated by the Marathas, Haryana’s by the Jats and Jharkhand had never seen a non-tribal chief minister since its formation. The Modi-Shah duo built their social alliances against this tide and after unprecedented victories in the polls, reinforced these tactics with their selection of chief ministers from the non-dominant communities. While it may seem that the Modi-Shah strategy has paid off today, the move was fraught with risks at the time. Both Fadnavis and Khattar bore the brunt of the wrath of the dominant groups (no doubt egged on by the opposition) in the form of reservation protests, which nearly cost them their chairs, and their party, the state. Also, this move was in stark contrast to the practice followed rather successfully by the Congress and its allies for decades in Maharashtra and, post the rise of Hooda, in Haryana. The strategy was to target the most electorally dominant caste and combine it with their traditional minority vote bank in order to create formidable social arithmetic, which almost guaranteed a victory in the face of a fractured opposition. Essentially, the path that the BJP chose to follow was far more difficult and required a herculean effort from the party and its larger ideological organization. Not only did it require the devolution of power into multiple social groups, it also involved the identification of a larger pool of leaders from the targeted groups. Not to mention the challenges of balancing a wider range of interests, which can, even at the best of times, be mutually conflicting. Once this narrative has been set, including in all three states, not only has there been a solidification of existing caste alliances, there is also evidence of the BJP’s expansion into the dominant caste groups.

The mass migration of a host of Maratha satraps into the party, its inroads into the Jat bastions of Haryana and UP and the addition of Hindu tribals in Jharkhand to the saffron coalition only point to the fact that the gambles of 2014 seem to have paid off. It is also significant to note what the reasons of such a migration could be. Certainly, the social schemes of the NDA government and the last-mile delivery achieved by the Prime Minister’s emphasis on implementation would have had its part to play. Even so, the historic cultural profiles of the Marathas and Jats when combined with the patterns of the fissuring of the tribal vote also point to the growing public resonance of the nationalist and Indic value systems represented by the Prime Minister and his party. It remains to be seen whether this result will be replicated in the assembly elections, when Narendra Modi is not on the ticket and more local factors begin to take precedence. There will certainly be more emphasis on the performance of the respective Chief Ministers, candidate selections and local governance issues than there was in the general elections (which the opposition unwittingly made out to be about Modi). In a sense, the voting patterns from the assembly polls will serve as an indicator of the long-term cohesiveness of the BJP’s social alliance, especially when it does not have the overt appeal of Narendra Modi to bind it. If the party succeeds in holding onto its newer and more expansive base, then the signs will be ominous for the opposition, especially with the Bihar polls coming up next year and the UP elections looming in the medium term. A repeat of the clean sweep in October followed by wins in Bihar and UP (the result in Delhi notwithstanding) will signify a quantum change in the political and social narrative of the country. Such victories could also open up this template to be replicated in the areas where the party has not managed to make significant inroads yet, specifically states in the south like Tamil Nadu. Perhaps more importantly, it will also represent a major step forward in the larger ideological battle to move the Indian polity towards one driven by Indic values. 

I’ll specifically be covering in next blog how Fadnavis and Khattar have done in their states.