Alliance trouble in Maharashtra? Crisis in MVA ahead of local body polls
MUMBAI: The Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), a bold political experiment launched five years ago in Maharashtra, is grappling with an existential crisis. Formed as a coalition of non-BJP parties – primarily the Congress, Shiv Sena (then undivided) and Nationalist Congress Party (then undivided) – it was meant to be a bulwark against the rising dominance of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). But its crushing defeat in the November 2024 assembly elections exposed a bitter reality – cracks have turned into fault lines, differences into hostile accusations, and one constituent has even hinted it might walk out on its allies.
Can the MVA regroup and turn things around, or have its constituents – the Congress, Shiv Sena (UBT) and NCP (SP) – reached a point of no return?
The crisis surfaced when Sena (UBT) mouthpiece ‘Saamana’ on Thursday said the party was considering contesting the upcoming Mumbai civic polls on its own, and not as a constituent of the MVA. On Friday, senior Congress leader Vijay Wadettiwar reopened an old wound, saying the allies had had wasted 20 days on seat-sharing discussions, which cost them dear in the assembly elections. Amol Kolhe, NCP (SP) MP, said it was apparent that the party’s allies, the Sena (UBT) and Congress, were not prepared to get their act together and the only hope for the people was NCP (SP) chief their Sharad Pawar.
The MVA was a first-of-its-kind experiment in which opposition parties as well as the Shiv Sena, an ally of the BJP, came together to keep the BJP of power. The saffron party, post-2014, had emerged as a dominant political party at the national level and in the state, and the MVA aimed to halt its seemingly unstoppable march. In the 2019 assembly elections, when the BJP-Sena alliance won a majority, the Sena walked out of the coalition as the BJP refused to rotate the chief minister’s position. Sharad Pawar, a veteran of coalitions, took the initiative and the Sena teamed up with secular parties to form an MVA government in Maharashtra. The experiment became a template for opposition parties at the national level, to form the INDIA coalition. Here too, all parties regardless of their ideologies, united on one platform.