Where Does The Maha Vikas Aghadi Go From Here?

Every defeat at the polls is a moment of crisis. But this loss is particularly crushing for Maharashtra’s Opposition. The Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) alliance which held power in the state until 2022 and whose performance in the General elections of 2024 had created a stir, is, after today’s results, in disarray.

None of the three parties put up a particularly united front, each one cutting alliances with other parties where it suited them. Not only have these bets not paid off, they now also bring to question the validity of the MVA itself.

In Mumbai, Uddhav Thackeray’s alliance with Raj Thackeray brought discomfort to the Congress, which stayed out of it. In Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad, Sharad Pawar-led NCP (SP) teaming up with Ajit Pawar’s NCP after such a bitter fallout between the two, raised eyebrows, however hard the two factions might try to explain it away as something willed by party workers. Not only did all this nudge-nudge and wink-wink talk of ‘there are no permanent enemies in politics’ and how a reunion between the two factions cannot be ruled out fail to enthuse the electorate, it has most certainly sown distrust within the rest of the MVA. And probably worse, the drubbing NCP (SP) received compared to NCP, will have convinced, if it was still in doubt, which of the two factions is the bigger deal in these parts.

Of the three constituents of the MVA, it is ironically the Congress, whose retreat from urban centres like Mumbai and Pune now seems complete, that had the better showing overall in the state. At the time of writing this, Congress was the party with the third largest number of seats across municipal bodies in Maharashtra, behind the BJP and Shiv Sena. It had managed to win Latur, and was leading in a handful of other corporations. It might not be much, especially given its strength at one point of time in the state, but it was less worse than the rest of the Opposition.

This election hasn’t just extended the BJP’s grip over the state. It has also brought into question the MVA’s future.