Future of JJP in Haryana, Shiv Sena in Maharashtra on line in assembly polls

Vibha Sharma
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, October 19

It’s almost voting day, and it’s two parties—the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s often belligerent ally Shiv Sena in Maharashtra and Haryana’s newest challenger Jannayak Janata Party—that are generating particular interest in a generally lacklustre election campaign.  

Maharashtra and Haryana assembly elections on October 21 come five months after Lok Sabha elections, which saw the BJP’s National Democratic Alliance ride the Modi wave into power. As a general trend the party that wins the general elections repeats its performance in assembly elections that follow soon after, although Congress-Nationalist Congress Party alliance bucked this trend in 1999 when it was able to form government in Maharashtra despite an NDA alliance at the Centre.  

Therefore, BJP leaders claim it isn’t their victory that is in question, it’s the margin. This is especially true in Haryana, which will see Dushyant Chautala’s JJP make its electoral debut. JJP is a breakaway party formed in December last year, when infighting within the first family of the Indian National Lok Dal led to Ajay Chautala and his two sons, Dushyant and Digvijay Chautala split from the parent party.

For already established parties in Haryana, this isn’t good news. Senior Congress leader Bhupinder Singh Hooda, a former chief minister of the state, calls it “vote katua”, and has already voiced fears that the JJP is likely to split votes and “hurt prospects of others and nothing else”.

Still, political observers are watching JJP’s performance—the party’s vote share in Jat strongholds of the state could decide the course for the newbie party. The party hopes to bank on the space that INLD has ceded. The Jat community constitutes more than a quarter of the state’s population, and both the Congress and the INLD bank on it. As for the BJP, while it hopes JJP’s entry into the already crowded fray vying for Jat votes would work to its advantage, it is also trying to capture votes in Jat dominated areas.  

In Maharashtra meanwhile opposition the Congress and the NCP are fighting on multiple battlefronts. The Congress is already reeling under infighting. Both Congress and the NCP have lost several important leaders to the BJP and the Sena before the elections. Additionally, the past few weeks before elections have seen another can of worms being reopened—NCP leader Praful Patel’s questioning by the Enforcement Directorate over allegations of a land deal with underworld don Dawood Ibrahim’s close aide Iqbal Mirchi.      

As for the Sena, political observers are closely watching Aaditya Thackeray’s entry into electoral politics—the first Thackeray to do so. Aaditya Thackeray, whose firebrand grandfather Bal Thackeray was the founder of the Shiv Sena and whose father is the party’s current head, will contest the elections from Worli.

The Thackeray scion’s entry into the electoral politics is significant in more than one way—it will decide not only his own fate in the elections but will also decide how relevant the Sena would be in Maharashtra’s politics and how much bargaining power it would have with the dominant ally, the BJP.  The Sena’s political base has been shrinking: it won only 63 of Maharashtra’s 288 seats in 2014—when it broke its 25-year-old alliance with the BJP—and later joined the ruling alliance as a smaller, but frequently abrasive, partner in the state government under Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, whose party won 122 seats.