OPINION | The crutch conundrum: Why BJP still needs allies in Maharashtra despite Amit Shah's ‘wipe out Opposition' call

Diwali may be over, but the festive mood in Mumbai is not over yet.

 

Diwali is a time for a lot of fun, food, and juicy gossip in political circles, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is no exception. The party that is always ready to fight the next elections, led by Generals like Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, spent this Diwali season deliberating over the next round of elections in Maharashtra; not that the deliberations are over. 

 

Permutations and combinations of alliances are being worked out. But the BJP leadership has given a big signal, that it wants to fight local body elections as part of Mahayuti, the saffron grand alliance, only in Mumbai.

Fadnavis may have said that they will fight in alliance in four municipal corporations, but the rank and file of the BJP, however, is keen to listen to what Amit Shah told them at the groundbreaking ceremony of the new Maharashtra BJP headquarters. 

 

That day, Shah thundered, “wipe out the Opposition,” and the BJP soldiers said ‘Sieg Heil’. It is on occasions like these that Amit Shah resembles historic military figures. The one that came to my mind was Field Marshal Gebhardt Bluecher, the legendary Prussian commander whose contribution at Waterloo in 1815 resulted in the total defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte. 

 

Marshal Bluecher was popularly known as ‘Marshal Forward’, as he always instructed his soldiers to attack and move forward in order to inflict defeat on his enemies. Amit Shah is always in such a mood when he is directing cadres for electoral fights.

 

One does not know whether Amit Shah has heard the name of Marshal Bluecher, but a source in the BJP said Amit Shah knows the life story and battles of Peshwa Bajirao I. He takes inspiration from Bajirao for the battlefield genius that the Peshwa, who did not face defeat in any of the battles and wars that he fought, was.

 

Be it Bluecher or Bajirao I, both of them had to forge tactical alliances to defeat their enemies. They were realistic, chose their battlefields well and knew the territory around by heart. 

 

This is where Amit Shah fails in their comparison. Amit Shah does not want the BJP to depend on any crutches, read alliance partners. “Wipe Out The Opposition” is his battle cry for BJP soldiers in Maharashtra. This is something that is easier said than achieved.

 

Amit Shah says that the BJP is the number one party in Maharashtra since 2014, and it was at number four before the 2014 elections. True, the credit entirely goes to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Amit Shah and Devendra Fadnavis. But the other, unsaid part of the truth is that the BJP has not been able to cross the simple majority mark of 145 seats in the state assembly elections on its own. It was 122 in 2014, 105 in 2019 and 135 in 2024. Of these 135, at least 30-40 are those who were satraps of Congress and NCP and joined the BJP to retain their fiefdom.

 

So it proves that Maharashtra BJP is not like the party's unit in Gujarat or Uttar Pradesh. Out here, below the Narmada, in the land of Shivaji Maharaj, the saffron party requires allies or crutches, as Amit Shah called them. That is why Maharashtra BJP leaders immediately had to issue a clarification after Amit Shah's remark on crutches. He did not mean that alliance partners were crutches, wipe out the Opposition was his main message, that was the lame defence put forward by the BJP brass in Maharashtra.

 

A little birdie inside the BJP told this writer that the aim of the BJP central leadership and leaders like Amit Shah is to fight the 2029 assembly on their own.

India