Mahayuti has a fragile truce but MVA partners have not yet settled
By T N Ashok
The announcement of Maharashtra’s urban local body election schedule has done more than set the clock ticking for civic polls—it has forced an uneasy ruling alliance to rediscover the value of unity.
With voting for all 29 municipal corporations, including the powerful Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), slated for January 15, the BJP-led Mahayuti has publicly closed ranks, signalling a ceasefire after weeks of open bickering that threatened to spill into a full-blown alliance rupture.
The truce is tactical, timely and fragile. Yet it marks a recognition across the BJP, Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and Ajit Pawar’s NCP that fragmentation at the local level would hand a decisive advantage to a rejuvenated opposition—Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT), Sharad Pawar’s NCP (SP) and the Congress—just as Maharashtra begins its long march toward the 2026 Assembly elections.
The détente did not emerge organically. It followed a blunt intervention from New Delhi. About a week before the State Election Commission unveiled the poll schedule, Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde is learnt to have conveyed his grievances against the state BJP leadership to Union Home Minister Amit Shah. Shah’s response was unambiguous: resolve differences directly with alliance partners rather than escalating them.
That message triggered what Mahayuti insiders describe as a “course correction.” Shinde’s subsequent meeting with Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis in Nagpur on December 9 set the tone. The two agreed to present a united front in municipal corporation elections and, crucially, to halt the poaching of each other’s leaders—an issue that had poisoned relations in the run-up to the first phase of local body polls earlier this month.
The choreography that followed was deliberate. State BJP chief RavindraChavan met Shah in Delhi, returned to Mumbai and sat down with Shinde. Days later, Fadnavis, Shinde and Ajit Pawar shared a highly publicised breakfast at the Chief Minister’s residence. The Winter Session of the Assembly in Nagpur became an extended negotiation room, with closed-door meetings aimed at papering over fissures before they became electoral liabilities.
Ajit Pawar, speaking internally to party colleagues, framed the moment starkly: alliances could be stretched only so far before they snapped. Unity, he argued, was no longer optional.
For the BJP, the immediate prize is the BMC, Asia’s richest municipal body and the symbolic heart of Shiv Sena politics. Ending the Sena’s three-decade dominance of Mumbai has long been an unfulfilled BJP ambition. The 2017 BMC election came tantalisingly close: the BJP won 82 seats, just two short of the undivided Sena’s 84, before offering outside support that allowed the Sena to retain the mayoralty.
That arrangement collapsed after the 2019 Assembly elections, when Uddhav Thackeray broke with the BJP and stitched together the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) with the Congress and the then-undivided NCP. For the BJP, that “betrayal” remains a defining grievance. Splitting the Shiv Sena in 2022 was the first act of political retribution; capturing the BMC is seen as the logical sequel.
But Mumbai is also where Mahayuti’s contradictions are most exposed. The Shinde-led Sena and the BJP draw from overlapping Marathi-Hindutva constituencies, while Ajit Pawar’s NCP has a more limited urban footprint. Contesting separately would split votes and all but guarantee a comeback opportunity for Uddhav Thackeray, whose party still commands emotional loyalty among sections of Mumbai’s electorate.
Chief Minister Fadnavis acknowledged as much when he argued that fighting together was less about ideological harmony than electoral arithmetic. A divided Mahayuti, he implied, would be ceding space by default.
The larger question, however, extends beyond January’s civic polls. Can the BJP and its allies—two of them splinter groups born of political engineering—take on a potentially united opposition in the 2026 Assembly elections?
On paper, the opposition’s arithmetic is compelling. The Shiv Sena (UBT), NCP (SP) and Congress together represent the original MVA coalition that governed Maharashtra until 2022. They retain recognisable brands, residual cadre networks and, in Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar, leaders who still command loyalty beyond raw seat counts.
The Mahayuti’s counter-argument rests on power and performance. The BJP remains the single largest organisational force in the state, with control over the levers of government at both the Centre and the state. Shinde’s Sena faction controls the official party name and symbol, while Ajit Pawar’s NCP enjoys similar institutional recognition. In Indian politics, legitimacy conferred by institutions often matters as much as legacy.
Yet the risk for the ruling alliance is twofold. First, its unity is transactional rather than organic. The ceasefire over “poaching” has been brokered from above, not forged from mutual trust. Second, local body elections amplify hyper-local rivalries. Seat-sharing negotiations for municipal corporations—especially in Mumbai, Thane, Pune and Nashik—are likely to reopen old wounds.
Historical data offers mixed signals. Two years before the 2019 Assembly elections, the BJP dominated municipal corporations, winning 1,099 of 2,736 seats with a 31.3% vote share. The undivided Sena trailed with 489 seats. But those numbers were achieved when the BJP and Sena were rivals, not fractured allies.
The political terrain has since shifted. Voters have witnessed splits, counter-splits and rebrandings that have blurred ideological lines. While the BJP hopes Hindutva will remain the glue holding Mahayuti together, the opposition is betting on fatigue with engineered politics and a nostalgia-driven consolidation around original party identities.
January’s municipal polls will therefore function less as isolated civic contests and more as a dress rehearsal for 2026. A strong Mahayuti performance—particularly a breakthrough in the BMC—would validate the BJP’s alliance management strategy and weaken Uddhav Thackeray’s claim to be the Sena’s authentic heir. A setback, on the other hand, would embolden the opposition and reopen debates within the BJP about whether accommodating allies is worth the price.
For now, the Mahayuti truce holds, underwritten by Delhi’s authority and the cold logic of electoral survival. Whether it can endure the pressures of seat-sharing, cadre management and competing ambitions will determine not just who runs Maharashtra’s cities in 2025, but who governs the state after 2026. (IPA Service)
