Thread by @gauravsabnis

My predictions (for what absolutely little they are worth) for #MaharashtraPoliticalCrisis are as follows.
The one inescapable outcome seems to be a formal pre poll alliance between Sena & NCP. Uddhav can't survive going back to the BJP politically, from any direction.

Eknath Shinde has been overplaying his hand since that Zee produced Dharmaveer movie came out, which was sanghi propaganda to put Dighe on par with Bal T in minds of the cadre, in preparation for putting Eknath on par with Uddhav.

The movie was the prequel for this drama.

Watch that movie Dharmaveer if you can get access to it. It's very much unvarnished propaganda, and to someone who grew up in the 80s&90s there, a remarkably dishonest retelling of the Anand Dighe phenomenon. Making him seem like he was almost on par with Bal Thackeray.

The logic behind this plan is very simple and transparent.

For all the recent praise Uddhav has been getting from progressives (like me 🤷🏽‍♂️) for his COVID handling & general standing up to the BJP & keeping Maharashtra relatively calm while the BJP-AAP states burn everyday....

... Within party cadre, his main draw is that he's Bal's anointed heir. And that extends to Aditya.

Now there's no other Thackeray who can capture that following. Raju tried. From every angle. Didn't work.

So if you can't become Bal's son to challenge Uddhav, what you do?

You take what was a legit political phenomenon within the Sena - Anand Dighe - and through the use of a pliant media & entertainment industry, inflate his appeal AND recast it in more saffron terms than it actually was.

If you, like me, remember 90s reality better, ykwim.

Dighe was the unquestioned boss of Thane Sena & a useful lieutenant of Bal Thackeray's during the rath Yatra babri riots blast phase running up to the 1995 election when SS-BJP first captured power.

But "dharma" & "Hindutva" had absolutely zero role to play in that campaign.

The intensity with which Bombay burned & butchered itself in 1992-93, much of it at the hands of the Sena cadre (proudly & publicly owned by Bal T) did shake up Bal T as well as Munde, plus Atal-Advani.

It's not like Sena "abandoned" Hindutva. But it recalibrated quite a bit.

The 1995 Maharashtra election, first time realistically that the Congress looked vulnerable in a state it had never even come close to losing, was fought almost entirely on corruption and "development" grounds. Very much a foreshadowing of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

Old folks like me will remember how rapidly Sena (& also then-BJP & also Congress whose hands were hardly clean) wanted to just move on from 92-93 violence & religion based polarization.

That election was big on Enron. Hehe, Maharashtra had Enron politics before California 😎💪.

The same Enron that ended up kinda indirectly making Schwarzenegger governor in California in 2003, had in 1995 precipitated a corruption scandal in Bombay that brought Bal Thackeray to power.

But neither he nor Dighe ever put the whole Hindu thing front and center after 1993.

The claim was - Congress is a corrupt inefficient dynastic party in turmoil and Sharad Pawar is corrupt AF and getting rich while not building anything. Elect us. We will also be a little corrupt but we will actually build things and fight organized crime better than them.

The simmering after effects of the 92-93 pogrom were still there. But no one was putting them front and center.

The SS-BJP still fell a little short of majority. But with independent support, formed the first non Congress government in Maharashtra.

BJP left the state to Bal T.

And you know what? Sena, after coming to power, did pretty much stick to their campaign promises!

Given the shit show that 21st century Maharashtra politics has been, that govt
a. Didn't start more anti-Muslim campaigns
b. Built a LOT of infrastructure
c. Fought organized crime

That Government won't get any human rights awards for it and thousands of innocent young Muslims were killed in the process, but Sena did cut organized crime in Bombay down to size.
Just like today's NYC, today's Bombay can't imagine how common gangster shootouts once were!

Sena also, unlike this MoSha fraud, delivered on the "vikas" promises.

The western express and eastern express highways might be an annoying traffic crawl for y'all today.

For my generation in the 90s, they were marvels of engineering! And they came up really fast!

The Bombay-Pune expressway was extra personal for Bal T. His original choice of heir, Bindumadhav, had died in an accident on the lethal old highway.
That project too, not exactly a popular one today, was built at astonishing pace. And was genuine "development" in real time.

But the Sena was always a Coast & Ghats party. For all the visible & tangible improvements it made in the greater Bombay region, in infrastructure as well as subduing organized crime, it ignored the rest of the state.

And Marathwada-Vidarbha felt left out.

As reelection approached, Bal T realized that his statewide numbers didn't look too good. Ideally, he wanted to just form a Sena Government. BJP was always the junior partner. Even to Anand Dighe. Who btw was getting caught up in organized crime struggles of his own at the time.

But there was a palpable pro-Atal-BJP mood in the country at the national level in 1999, after the uncertain period of "4 prime ministers in 3 years" phase. He dissolved the assembly a little bit early to ride the same wave back to power, in alliance with the BJP.

Didn't work.

In something rare in Indian politics, Maharashtra voted for Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha on the same day.

And Maharashtra voters, much like many US swing states in 2000, split their ballots!

SS-BJP got a majority of the LS votes. But lost power in the Vidhan Sabha.

Bal T kinda lost it after that. He felt personally betrayed. He had reined in his street troops, delivered on poll promises, and yes he also got in bed with Enron but he honestly said "they used to take bribes in suitcases, we take them in briefcases 🤷🏽‍♂️" on TV!

Dude started going after Valentine's Day, which even to the generally socially active sena cadre, seemed like a bizarre shift. Western Maharashtra in 1999 wasn't exactly San Francisco, but was quite permissive of dating and relationships by Indian standards. So that was odd!

And if you recall, as soon as Bal handed over power to Uddhav, the weird anti Valentine Day campaign was swiftly put to bed. Even Raj, who has taken every position it is possible to take in Maharashtra politics 🤭🤭 hasn't opposed Valentine's Day.

Anyhoo, post that 1999 loss, Sena went through a bit internal civil war, first the succession battles, then the split that created MNS, then realizing that omg, BJP isn't content to be junior partner anymore. It's been one short term crisis after another.

Uddhav in 2019 seemed to realize that his party has no real future in alliance with Modi & Fadnavis' BJP if they can win twice as many seats. This wasn't Atal-Advani BJP that left Maharashtra to the Sena. These dudes want to run & own EVERYTHING!

Then why would they need Sena?

Uddhav was never as firebrand or as into Hindutva as his father or Raj. He was always the Michael not the Sonny. And he realized in 2019 that the one thing his father did right was focus on actual "vikas" at least somewhat. And that BJP doesn't really do. Hence Maha Vikas Aghadi.

Uddhav's 2.5 years, especially when compared to the rest of the country, have been pretty decent. If I were him, I would be crowing about how much better the state's covid response is & how Bombay (with Madras) is one city that has not been beset by bloodthirsty sanghi mobs.

But he is not a natural politician. Tho he might be doing actual work, thinking that is enough, the Sena cadre, especially ambitious ones like Eknath Shinde, see an opening in the messaging space ceded to the sanghi media-entertainment-WhatsApp-Twitter complex.

Shinde's position, from a short term personal perspective, is a solid one in cold political terms.

A Sena-BJP alliance would easily win majority. It did last time too!

But Uddhav is thinking more long term. For his son as well as the state. He's just not a "Hindutva" guy.

Neither is Shinde a genuine Hindutva guy. Hence the movie and the #dharmaveer rebranding. He sees that Fadvya has become a joke and has no real future in BJP, no matter how many stunts he pulls. Modi & Shah also see that Fadvya has no future.

Modi Shah are like, Shinde is our best bet to recapture Maharashtra. And then if he's happy joining the party in exchange for disbanding the Sena from within, we'll get in bed with him now.

Shinde has gone all in on that. On being the Maharashtra chieftain for emperor Modi.

Uddhav has only one realistic option left if the government falls. Align with the NCP and cut the Congress loose.

Both the Sena and NCP are solidly regional cadre based parties. With genuine bases that have still somewhat withstood the Modi wave. Ideologically too, similar.

Sena has the unions and the urban working class crowd. NCP has the farmers and small town crowd.

Both parties have no option but to stand up as the anti-BJP alternatives. Or the BJP will swallow them in the next term.

Uddhav might also just go, you know what, I'm too old for this shit. You can have Maharashtra. I'm gonna go back to photography and wildlife.

So a BJP Maharashtra is very much possible. 🤷🏽‍♂️

The next election will pretty much decide Maharashtra's future and the country's future. If the BJP+ShindeSena are able to hit the 40% mark and SS-NCP cut each other's votes like last time, we will get a BJP government for the rest of our lives in Bombay.

Ugh. Hope not!

This might be my western Maharashtra progressive bias speaking but I just don't think my state is a good cultural fit for Modi Shah Bisht style Hindu rashtra Hindutva. We are too diverse for it and also just not as orthodox as the Hindi heartland or Gujarat.

Even Maharashtra's "Hinduism", in general terms, is not the rigid brahminical one followed in many BJP bastions up north. We have MANY tribal & local gods and goddesses. It is not the default brahminical Hinduism after you leave Bombay Pune living rooms. It's chaotic!

I think of Maharashtra and West Bengal as distant twins in many ways and this is one of them.

Sure, sangh has a following in both and sure, BJP might win an election or two there. But we are just not good long term fits for the kind of Hindutva they're selling these days.

The BJP has never even come close to winning a majority on its own in Maharashtra.

They tried going it alone in 2014, soon after the Modi wave swept the state in the LS. They fell well short of the majority, couldn't even touch 30% of voteshare. Needed Sena to come to power.

So even from the MoSha perspective, this Shinde stunt seems oddly timed. These machinations look so skeezy on TV. And Shinde, for all his bombast, is very much a regional leader. His sudden Hindutva turn notwithstanding, he just isn't enough for BJP to win without Uddhav.

These stunts are looking so sleazy on TV that even many of the sanghi voters I know in Maharashtra are on social media going, ewww, what is this? Not like this! They would prefer to fight it out in 2014 and just bash Uddhav and Pawar till then.

They know the perils of power.

Sanghis with some brain know that even if they manage to topple the Uddhav government, what will it get them beyond some news cycle & social media wins? A tiny 2 yr stint, mostly in the shadow of the 2014 campaign? And covid cases rising again? And the economy sluggish?

Maharashtra is an incredibly complex state with an incredibly complex government. No matter what Fadvya thinks, just getting sworn in by a governor doesn't make you King.

Even if BJP gets power, it then owns all the problems in Maharashtra as the incumbents. Why do that?

Unless....hmmm... They want power just so they can dissolve the assembly in time for the Vidhan Sabha elections to happen at the same time as the 2024 Lok Sabha ones? 🤔

Basically the same gamble Bal T took in 1999 and lost.

In 2019 LS elections in Maharashtra, the BJP-SS alliance won 41 out of 48 states, with a combined 51% voteshare!

That's a huge voteshare in Indian politics. And BJP won most seats. Thought it could carry this over into the October VS elections. So cut Sena loose.

But come October, BJP only got the 27% voteshare in VS, almost exactly the same that it got in the LS while in alliance with the SS.

And SS voteshare went down from 23% to 20%. A decline but not a lethal one by any means.

But the numbers made one thing clear.

That there is no "yuti" voter. The BJP's gamble was that its national wave was big enough to lure away enough voters from the Sena to cross 35% voteshare (usually enough in Indian politics for a simple majority in seats). It was wrong.

Hence this Shinde strategy.

They are hoping to bully Uddhav back into the fold. But even if that doesn't happen, hoping to split the Sena enough to get enough votes and seats to form a govt in the next election.

And the whole Dharmaveer myth making is in that direction. To counter the Bal T aura politely.

The Yuti was always an alliance of convenience between Marathis First Sena and Hindu Savarnas First BJP, making it a good fit for Marathi Savarnas as long as Marathi Savarnas held power in Maharashtra.

It can't survive the Modi/Shah/Bisht style centralized Hindutva.

Anyway, I'm writing this as we wait for Uddhav's Livestream speech.

Let's see how things unfold. /End thread