There is good reason why Amit Shah will continue as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President — at least till the assembly polls later this year. Despite an uninterrupted five years in power, the chief ministers of both Maharashtra and Haryana, which go to the polls in September-October, are unlikely to make the cut without a leg up from Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
While Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar lacks charisma, in Maharashtra, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has been unable to spread his footprints across the regions of the state. Even in his home turf of Vidarbha he is more a Nagpur leader and fails to impress voters outside the city (six assembly segments make up the Nagpur Lok Sabha constituency).
More than that Fadnavis has been unable to gain the confidence of both his Cabinet and party workers — on the contrary his chief ministership has been racked and troubled by dissent and resentment in the BJP, apart from the fact that the Shiv Sena has had various disagreements with him over the past five years.
That said, Fadnavis appears to be the most-favoured among BJP CMs to both Modi and Shah. He has also successfully pulled off a tightrope walk between the BJP top duo and Nitin Gadkari, Cabinet minister and senior BJP leader who is also from Nagpur, and is considered a favourite of the RSS leadership.
Left to his own resources, Fadnavis is unlikely to win a majority in the upcoming assembly polls. Even at the height of Modi’s charisma in 2014 with hope on the horizon and without the baggage of demmonetisation, GST, vigilante violence, etc that overtook the later years of Modi’s first stint at the Centre, the BJP fell short of a majority on its own, winning 122 in a House of 288. The BJP-Shiv Sena alliance had split 15 days prior to the polls — perhaps the BJP’s calculation was that it could win the assembly polls on its own. That did not happen, and the BJP had to eat humble pie and spend the next five years in a troubled relationship with the Shiv Sena.
The Shiv Sena may now be on the same page as the BJP, but the party is aware that Maharashtra has not lost its socialist ethos and is still not integrated into the kind of Hindu majoritarianism that is clearly visible in many states north of the Vindhyas.