CHANDRAKANT PATIL, Maharashtra’s revenue minister and newly-appointed president of the state BJP, believes in starting with a bang. Within weeks of assuming his new post, Patil engineered resignations of four senior opposition legislators to bring them to the BJP fold.
Nationalist Congress Party MLAs Shivendra Raje Bhosale (Satara constituency), Sandeep Naik (Airoli) and Vaibhav Pichad (Akole), and Congress MLA Kalidas Kolambkar (Wadala) submitted their resignations to Speaker Haribhau Bagade on July 30. Kolambkar is a former Shiv Sena member who switched to the Congress in 2005. Shivendra is the son of late Abhaysinh Raje Bhosale, a confidante of NCP founder Sharad Pawar.
Naik is bringing more than 50 corporators of Navi Mumbai municipal corporation also to the BJP, thus enabling the saffron party to pocket yet another important civic body. Vaibhav’s father and former minister Madhukar Pichad, and NCP women’s wing president Chitra Wagh, also joined the BJP on July 31.
Just a few days earlier, Sharad Pawar had accused the BJP of stealing opposition legislators by threatening them with central agencies. Chandrakant Patil responded: “Pawar should introspect why so many NCP and Congress leaders are joining the BJP. The answer is clear, they see no future in these parties. There is no question of threatening anyone with inquiries.”
State BJP vice-president Prasad Lad told THE WEEK that legislators like Abdul Sattar (Congress) will soon join the BJP. Other legislators who are likely to join the BJP in the days ahead are Jaykumar Gore of the Congress and Manohar Naik of the NCP.
With assembly elections around the corner, it is no surprise that the leaders who are joining the BJP and Shiv Sena are the ones who want to keep their pockets of influence intact. The strategy by BJP-Sena seems to be to induct legislators or prominent leaders from the constituencies belonging to the opposition parties.
Political observers feel that the exodus from the Congress-NCP fold will continue in the days ahead as the BJP-Sena alliance clearly has an upper hand in the run-up to the assembly polls. “These legislators had won their seats despite the Modi wave in 2014,” said political analyst Abhay Deshpande. “So when they join BJP or Shiv Sena along with their supporters, the entire party organisation of the opposition parties will face a blow in these constituencies. The morale of the Congress and NCP is already down [after the Lok Sabha elections]. These defections have been planned to make matters worse for them.”