The rapid rise in popularity of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) can be easily gauged by the qualitative changes that have taken place in the politics of Maharashtra, the country’s second-largest state, from rural to urban, over the past two decades. Although the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) failed to achieve the desired success in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, it achieved unprecedented success in the state’s assembly elections later that year, shattering all previous records. The BJP achieved this success at the expense of the Congress, once considered the state’s strongest party. While the Congress party appears to be marginalized across the state, its roots remain widespread across the state, from villages to cities, and its legacy is considered extensive, allowing it to occasionally perform regional miracles in elections.
In the recently concluded elections for 29 municipal corporations in Maharashtra (including Mumbai), the Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies won in 23 cities. The Congress Party also managed to retain its majority in two cities, Bhiwandi and Latur, on its own. Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party, which split from the Congress around 1999, has now been virtually wiped out. Furthermore, the Shiv Sena, considered the second most powerful party in the state, faces an existential crisis in the rest of the state, excluding Mumbai. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s political landscape in the state has been volatile, but since the 1990s, it has begun to strengthen its power by forming an alliance with the Shiv Sena, expanding its Hindutva politics, even at the Shiv Sena’s expense. The Shiv Sena’s influence began to expand across the state in the 1980s, beginning with the Mumbai Municipal Corporation. Subsequently, the party’s Marathi identity politics began to have an impact in other regions of the state, and Marathi Manus and Hindutva became its core values. The BJP, through an alliance with this party, brought the national agenda of Hindutva to Maharashtra and expanded its influence. This allowed the BJP, along with the Shiv Sena, to reach the state’s villages. Otherwise, until the 1970s, the party was known as a North Indian party in the state and consistently lost even in the Nagpur region, where the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) headquarters has been located. However, by the 1990s, fundamental changes began to emerge, with the Shri Ram Temple construction movement in Ayodhya, which began in 1986, playing a major role.
Shiv Sena also openly supported this movement at that time and even gave it a militant tone. Shiv Sena founder, the late Balasaheb Thackeray, sent a large force of his volunteers to the Ram Mandir movement. However, the reins of this movement were in the hands of the Bharatiya Janata Party, led by its then leader, Shri Lal Krishna Advani. This facilitated the BJP’s expansion in western states like Maharashtra. Previously, when the wave of anti-Congressism swept across the country in 1967, the BJP (Jan Sangh) was confined to the states of North India. However, that year saw the formation of non-Congress governments for the first time in nine states.
Congress won 47 of Maharashtra’s 48 Lok Sabha seats and a two-thirds majority in the state assembly. However, this decline began after the 1970s, primarily due to Shiv Sena’s success in instilling its radical Hindutva and Marathi identity politics in the state’s Marathi community. The BJP’s alliance with the BJP since the 1990s began to diminish Congress’s dominance in the state. With the BJP’s rise to national prominence in the late 1980s, the Shiv Sena began to enjoy significant success in both the Lok Sabha and state assembly elections. This alliance between the two parties continued until 2019. Following that year’s elections, a dispute arose over the Chief Minister’s position, and the Shiv Sena broke off its alliance with the BJP and joined forces with the Congress party, against which it had been fighting since its inception. This dealt a severe blow to the Shiv Sena’s ideological stance, which it had used to solicit votes from the Marathas.
The reality was that the Shiv Sena and the BJP fought the 2019 assembly elections together, and voters gave this alliance an absolute majority, with BJP MLAs outnumbering Shiv Sena MLAs. However, the Shiv Sena, driven by its desire to retain the Chief Ministership, broke the alliance and joined forces with the Congress and Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party, appointing its leader, Uddhav Thackeray, as Chief Minister. This secured power for the Shiv Sena, but its support base began to crumble. In 2022, this party leader, Eknath Shinde, broke away from the Shiv Sena and formed his own Shiv Sena. Shinde’s Shiv Sena has achieved significant success in all elections held in Maharashtra since 2022. Shinde strategically aligned with the BJP and attempted to revive the ideological politics of Balasaheb Thackeray, and continues to achieve consistent success. But amid this turmoil, Congress, Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party, and Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena are losing ground across the state, positions that the Bharatiya Janata Party is rapidly gaining. In a sense, Maharashtra has become a laboratory for the BJP, one that can be replicated in other states where the BJP remains weak and regional parties have significantly outpaced the Congress. Therefore, the impact of Maharashtra’s civic elections on the national level is considered natural.
