As the two main political alliances forming the broad spectrum of the
state politics in Maharashtra got over, with NCP quitting the senior partner
Congress and BJP walking out of the Combine with Shiv Sena, the rush was to
forge new alliances, to retain smaller allies, to find new allies.
Congress immediately announced Samajwadi Party coming on board with it,
but a day later we came to know it was a premature announcement.
The BJP-Shiv Sena split saw increased bonhomie between Raj Thackeray
and Uddhav Thackeray but there is no definitive word on the political rivals
from the Thackeray family coming together.
BJP retained three of the four smaller parties of the Mahayuti, the
grand alliance that contested the Lok Sabha elections, Raju Shetti's Swabhimani
Paksh, Mahadev Jankar's Rashtriya Samaj Party and Vinayak Mete's Shiv Sangram. These
small parties carry significant electoral weight in different regional pockets
of Maharashtra.
But RPI(A)'s stand was not clear. Both, Shiv Sena and BJP, were
trying to woo Ramdas Athavale given the significant chunk of Dalit votes in the
state.
Dalits are around 12% of the population of the state and have been a
traditional vote bank of Congress-NCP.
An alliance with RPI(A), a previous Congress-NCP ally, fragmented the
Dalit votes in Western Maharashtra, Marathwada and Mumbai, regions where Dalits
are a major electoral force.
The Dalit vote fragmentation led the BJP-Shiv Sena Combine win many
seats that it had lost in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections.
And so there was a rush to win over RPI(A) and the BJP finally won it.
True, there are other Dalit political outfits in Maharashtra including
three other factions of Dr. BR Ambedkar's RPI (led by Dr. Ambedkar's grandson
Prakash Ambedkar), but RPI(A) is the largest one of this divided mess.
And it will certainly help BJP in diverting more votes away from
Congress and NCP, given the fact that the National Democratic Alliance (NDA)
got 4% of the Dalit votes in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com
