A fortnight from now, the political landscape of Maharashtra will have altered. The so-called internal assessment of the Congress-NCP think tanks is that the saffron front of the BJP and Shiv Sena is so badly divided and demoralised that together they are seeking survival and not power. But this self-complacent assessment could yet prove to be far off the mark.

The assuredness of the Congress-led front comes from the disarray in the BJP leadership and depression among their cadre. The Shiv Sena too has split, with many in the Congress sure that Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena will split the urban Marathi vote bank, which will automatically benefit the ruling front. The reality though is not so simplistic. The reason is that Maharashtra now is a politically fragmented state.

In fact, there is not one election, there are 288 elections. This is because there is not even a discernable regional pattern. Most Indians outside Maharashtra, including national party leaders and the national media, tend to perceive Maharashtra as a uni-lingual, uni-cultural and uni-socio-political state. The corporate circles and Bollywood look at the razzmatazz of Mumbai and mourn the decline and death of its hypnotic ebullience. Earlier the Shiv Sena and now the MNS are seen by the Hindi and English channels as rabble-rousers or Marathi fascists. The prejudiced shadow of this perception falls on the general Marathi ethos — and the politics of Maharashtra, in their eyes, becomes a shadow-play.

To get a clear picture, it is necessary to erase the shadow. Though, as part of the linguistic state policy, Maharashtra was carved out on the basis of Marathi-speaking communities, in reality the people in Vidarbha are not enamoured of the Marathi linguistic identity, nor is most of Marathwada. The issue of the so-called migrants’ invasion does not appeal to them.

... contd.