Maharashtra Polls: Continuity amidst Social Volatility

Table 2: Retention of Leads from LS to Assembly

Increasingly, election results in Maharashtra make sense only when disaggregated at the regional level. This is because of the varied strength of different parties in each region and also because of the politics of coalitions that forces each party to cede some territory to its alliance partner. In this sense, the election outcome does not necessarily reflect the true strength of the parties.

Table 2 shows how leads in assembly segments in Lok Sabha elections altered/ translated into success in this election. Overall, 32% wins of the Congress came in assembly segments where the Sena-BJP combine had leads in the Lok Sabha election while the same figure for NCP was 48%. In other words, the political situation in

Table 3: Assembly Result by Regions

the RLDS – four each to PWP and SP, one

each to Bahujan Mahasangh of Prakash

Ambedkar, the Communist Party of India

(Marxist), Rashtriya Samaj Paksha and

Swabhimani party of Raju Shetty. The

RLDS polled approximately 5% of the votes.

share went to the MNS led by Raj Thackeray.

for the first time and managed to win 13

Table 1: Maharashtra Assembly Election 2009

Source: Compiled from CSDS Data Unit.

Congress parties had mustered a lead in 129 assembly segments and therefore, it could be argued that they actually managed to improve their condition in the interval of six months. However, beneath this overall impression, there is a lot of churning at the regional and constituency level that has taken place in shaping this result.

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most parts of the state has been quite volatile and no party can claim to have a firm base in most parts of the states. This is perhaps clearer from an analysis of the result at the regional level. Table 3 reports the result of the assembly election by regions and Table 4 compares vote percentages polled by major parties in

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each region in Lok Sabha and assembly elections. Even if we make allowance for seat adjustment due to the alliance factor, Table 4 shows considerable fluctuations in vote share across parties in each region. In Konkan, NCP has gained mainly at the cost of the Shiv Sena; while contrary to general impression, Shiv Sena has actually gained in the Mumbai-Thane region. Real gains for the Congress have accrued in west Vidarbha and partly Marathwada. All these details beg a question: are support bases of different parties in the state stable or is their popular support contingent in nature?

Vote Divisions

We may perhaps begin to answer this question by first looking at the urban-rural divide. This is because of two reasons: in the first place, ever since the latest delimitation exercise took place, much has been said about urban constituencies getting numerical ascendance in the assembly. Maharashtra is one of the most urbanised states of India and by now nearly half of its population may be already living in urban locations. Thus, a party that gains upper hand in the urban locations is more likely to sway the electoral outcomes in the future. Second, historically, Congress (and so also are all from urban constituencies. Yet, it is interesting to note that both Congress and Shiv Sena have around the same proportion of their MLAs (35% and 34%, respectively) belonging to urban areas and BJP is by far the most dependent on urban MLAs since 39% of its MLAs are from urban constituencies. Also, the hold of Congress-NCP on rural areas is much more secure even today with over 58% rural constituencies belonging to these two parties. In other words, growing urbanisation need not necessarily endanger the chances of the Congress while Sena and BJP have not been able to dent the Congress-NCP in their rural bastions. This holds the key to the success of the Congress and NCP in the state. This can also be seen from survey data: Table 6 shows how the voters in different locations voted in the assembly election. A large majority among the voters of big urban centres appears to be in favour of the Congress coalition, but ironically, our data shows that two out of every three voters of the BJP and Sena are from rural areas. This means that the initial support

Table 5: Assembly 2009 Results by Urban-Rural

that these parties received from urban voters when their coalition first came to power has been lost in the course of the last decade. This perhaps explains the repeated failure of these parties since 1999 to beat the Congress.

However, the urban-rural dimension is not the only one where this instability in electoral support is on display. One finds that in the case of the most crucial factor in state politics – the social base – too, there is considerable churning taking place. The study of Lok Sabha election of 2009 had indicated that Marathas are more inclined in favour of the Shiv Sena (Deshpande and Birmal 2009: 139). After an interval of six months, but more due to the micro-processes that are often at work during an assembly election, we find some volatility in the social bases of parties. For instance, Marathas were much more fragmented this time: this is not exactly a new development. Ever since the NCP was formed, Maharashtra has witnessed a fragmentation of the Maratha-Kunbi caste cluster. It is another matter that Congress as well as the Marathas have retained power despite this fragmentation (Palshikar and Birmal 2003). As Table 7 shows, Congress gets greater support among upper castes, dalits and other non-dalit/non-OBC castes.

and the interests protected by them are supposed to be predominantly rural and the rise of Shiv Sena and BJP was at one stage seen as having its roots in urban constituencies (Vora 1996; Vora and Palshikar 1996).

Subsequent political developments however caution us against believing that BJP and Shiv Sena draw support only or

Total 94 122 72 288

Urban – More than 70% Urban population as per 2001 Census. Rural – More than 80% Rural population as per 2001 Census. Mix – Rest. Source: Lokniti Delimitation Data.

Table 6: Vote Preference by Location – Assembly 2009

(in %)

losing the advantage among Marathas. The Shiv Sena and BJP were unable to rely on any social group as their core base; except the (non-Kunbi) OBCs, though Shiv Sena, rather than the BJP gets more than average votes among the upper castes. The limitation of the NCP is that it does not get additional support among Marathas

Others 29 34 26 37 40 33 33

N 143 418 466 210 232 120 1589

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preferences – support among men and women is almost equal in the case of Congress, NCP, BJP and MNS; while in the case of Shiv Sena, support among women is much less (14%) than among men (18%).

Surprising as it may seem, Congress appears to be attracting middle income sections more than the poor; while its partner the NCP draws more support among the rich (Table 8). In contrast, the BJP draws a little more support from the lower half of the class ladder and Shiv Sena pins its hopes more on the lower

Table 8: Class Base of Parties – Assembly 2009 (in %)

Source: Assembly post-poll survey; all figures except in bottom row are percentages.

middle section. But more importantly, the stout refusal of the very poor to be the core base of any of the main political players is very noteworthy. Incidentally, MNS receives a large share of votes from the upper income sections – almost its entire support comes from these sections.

Government Performance

Critics of the 10 year-old Congress-NCP government were unanimous that the government had not done much to improve the conditions of the poor and generally failed to register impressive development. Critics would always compare the performance of the state government with Gujarat to bring home the point that the state government could ensure neither industrial development nor agrarian progress. The string of suicides by the farmers was another issue that the opposition and critics of the government would mention repeatedly. In response, the ruling parties relied on citing the amounts that the government allocated for various sections; the packages that the government framed for different segments of the society; various schemes of the central government that would bring further “development”, etc. Even non-partisan sentiment in the state was that the government had squandered an opportunity to imaginatively engage with issues of social

Economic & Political Weekly

both from upper classes and the poor. In Orissa too, the state government has succeeded in drawing support from both these sections. Maharashtra is perhaps a mildly similar case of this: the state government

Table 10: Perceived Economic Condition and Vote Preference

Cong+ BJP+ Others All

Improved 42 29 29 42

Same 36 31 33 45

Worsened 30 31 39 13

Source: Assembly post-poll survey; all figures except in last column are in row percentages; N=1557.

Table 11: Satisfaction and Vote for Congress-NCP

Cong+ BJP+ MNS O All

Fully satisfied 63 11 2 25 21

Somewhat satisfied 42 25 5 29 40

Somewhat dissatisfied 27 39 5 29 15

Fully dissatisfied 10 52 15 23 17

No Opinion 30 47 2 21 7

Source: Assembly post-poll survey; all figures except in last column are in row percentages; N=1604.

in objective terms may not have much to show, but it seems to have managed to create a sense of limited satisfaction among the voters. This same tension between objective conditions and subjective perceptions is evident in people’s assessment of their own economic condition: only 13% of the respondents from our survey said that their (their family’s) economic condition had worsened during the past five years; 42% thought it had improved and another 45% said it had remained the same. The association between this perception and vote preference also appears to be quite neat: those who felt their condition had improved tend to vote more for the Congress-NCP (Table 10). Our survey also shows that as against 32% of the respondents who were dissatisfied with the performance of the state government, 61% were satisfied. This is no mean achievement considering the criticisms of the objective economic conditions of the state. Not surprisingly then, 47% of the respondents felt that this government may be given another opportunity to rule the state. We also find a very strong and neat association between satisfaction and vote for the Congress-NCP (Table 11). Does this mean that Congress and NCP have acquired a social profile that will take them further in their popularity and also build pressure on them to adopt pro-people policies?

Reasons for Victory

The consecutive electoral victory of the Congress and NCP is an outcome of three or four factors: the overall favourable political atmosphere created by the Congress performance nationally in Lok Sabha elections, the utter ineffectiveness of the BJP-Shiv Sena coupled with their internal party factionalisms, rise of MNS as a rival of BJP-Sena in urban constituencies, and a perception that the state government had not done a bad job. However, it is difficult to attribute the outcome entirely to the performance of the Congress-led government in the state. Moreover, the Congress-NCP alliance has not evolved any sharp social profile over the last decade or so. In the previous section we have seen that Congress and NCP cannot boast to draw support from any particular caste group nor do they have a clear class base.

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november 28, 2009 vol xliv no 48

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