PANAJI
Is the door for an alliance between the BJP and the MGP really shut or is it ajar?
Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s spirited speech at a party workers’ rally near Panaji on Thursday seemed to have shut the door firmly on the alliance when he indicated on more than one occasion that the BJP is going it alone in the upcoming state assembly polls.
But mutterings by senior party leaders, including Union Minister of State for Tourism Shripad Naik as well Transport Minister Mauvin Godinho and former Maharashtra Chief Minister and Goa in charge for the 2022 polls Devendra Fadnavis suggest that the door might still be tentatively ajar for the MGP to walk in.
While such doublespeak is absolutely not a rare phenomenon in politics, the love-hate relationship between the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party over the last few decades needs to be examined in context of the Shiv Sena and BJP combine in neighbouring Maharashtra.
Founded in the 1960s, Shiv Sena is Maharashtra’s legacy political party, while the BJP is a relatively new entrant to the western Indian state’s political landscape.
When the two parties first aligned together in 1989, Shiv Sena was the alliance's senior partner. Both parties were invested in Hindutva and had a common appeal for the Hindu conservative voters in the state.
When the two parties rode to power in 1995, the Shiv Sena had 73 MLAs, while the BJP had 65 MLAs.
With time, BJP, which slowly had developed a pan-India appeal, systematically managed to slowly stifle the growth of the Sena, while also expanding its base statewide. The BJP’s increasing footprint also led to a split in more recent times between the two parties, who were once considered natural allies in Maharashtra politics.
In Goa too, the BJP was the junior ally in its early coalition with the MGP in the 1994 assembly polls. Riding on the MGP’s stature, the BJP managed to open its account in the state assembly by winning four assembly seats in the polls, while the MGP won 10.
But once, it had its foot in the assembly, Manohar Parrikar – who had won the Panaji assembly seat for the first time, while Shripad Naik also won his first assembly election from Marcaim – and then state Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Chief Subhash Velingkar gradually managed to create enough traction in the ideologically similar (to the BJP) vote-bank of the MGP, to outdo the latter in the 1999 assembly polls.In those polls, the MGP won only four seats, while the BJP won 10.
While the BJP had both outgrown and outsmarted the MGP in the 1990-2000 decade, the continued importance of the latter has not been lost on the former.
In the 2012 state assembly polls, the BJP managed to win a simple majority for the first time in Goa, largely on account of the ‘mahayuti’ between the two parties.
The significance of the MGP to the BJP’s scheme of things could not have been lost out in the 2017 polls, when the BJP crumbled to a mere 13 seats, after it took on the Dhavalikar brothers-led party.
One of the obvious reasons for contrary statements by BJP leaders over the possibility of an alliance with the MGP is the classic good cop versus bad cop strategy.
The bad cop being Amit Shah's rhetoric about ramming through alone, versus the plenty of good cop talk by Fadnavis, Shripad Naik and Godinho.
The BJP may expect to hope that the duality in approach could perhaps confuse the Dhavalikar brothers, who in contemporary political history have been known to end up on the right side of the deal more often than not.
Or perhaps the strategy is intended to drive a split between the two brothers Sudin and Deepak, who have also institutionalised the good cop versus bad cop (in that respective order) philosophy.
Or perhaps, the mysterious meeting between Sudin Dhavalikar and Fadnavis (both seemed reluctant to admit that it happened) has already prepared the groundwork for a seat-sharing alliance. And the BJP’s contradictory signals are aimed at confusing political opponents, keen on a seat-sharing deal with the MGP.
