Decode Politics: Why BJP fell from 23 to 9 in Maharashtra

MAHARASHTRA was considered a state which might make or break the BJP’s fortunes in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. And it held true to that, bringing down the party to nine seats from 23 in 2019, and stopping it well short of a majority in Parliament.

The BJP’s Mahayuti allies also performed poorly, with the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena getting seven seats and Ajit Pawar’s NCP just 1. The NDA thus was reduced to 17 seats out of 48 in the state. In 2014, with the united Sena an ally, the NDA had won 43 seats.

Some factors behind this result:

* Sympathy for Uddhav Thackeray, Sharad Pawar

The state never settled down courtesy the BJP after the party failed to secure a majority in the 2019 Assembly elections. However, while it may have come back into power by breaking first the Shiv Sena and the NCP, the BJP left the voters unimpressed.

Instead, the sympathy factor seems to have benefited the original leaders of the Sena and NCP, from under whose noses their parties were seen as “stolen” – Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar, respectively.

Uddhav, who was projected as the face of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition – or INDIA – in Maharashtra, won nine of the 21 seats it contested. This was two more than the Shinde-led Sena, which contested 15 seats and won seven.

In the split, the Shinde Sena, which walked away with most of the united Sena’s MLAs and MPs, had got both the name of the party and its symbol. Still, that didn’t come in the Uddhav faction’s way.

Similar was the case with the Ajit Pawar-led NCP, which won the name and the symbol after breaking away from the party created and bred by Sharad Pawar. While Pawar Senior again came up on top, with an impressive strike rate of winning seven of the 10 seats it contested, Ajit’s