The importance of being Deva Bhau

The recently-concluded municipal elections in Maharashtra, where the BJP-led Mahayuti won 24 out of 29 civic bodies, including the all-important Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), has catapulted Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis (Deva Bhau to his political fans) as one of the front-runners in the race to succeed Narendra Modi, whenever that happens. 

Of the three potential contenders for the top job in Delhi, assuming the BJP remains in power in 2029 and beyond, Fadnavis is 55, Yogi Adityanath 53, and Amit Shah 61. All have age on their side since there is unlikely to be a vacancy at Lok Kalyan Marg in the near future. Of the three, Fadnavis has the additional advantage of being from Nagpur, the headquarters of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The Sangh is favourably inclined towards him, though it is also warming up to Yogi. Shah’s strength is his indispensability to the organisation as its main election strategist, and by virtue of his indirect control of the organisation even after moving to the home ministry - something like what was the case with Sardar Patel vis-a-vis Nehru in 1946. In any given organisational test of strength, Shah could be ahead. As for Yogi Adityanath, he rules the hearts of Hindutva - something similar to the position Modi held before he was declared the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in 2013. As things stand, any of the three stands a good chance of being Modi’s successor.

But before we get around to discussing the strengths and weaknesses of Modi’s potential successors, it is important to understand the scale of the BJP’s victories in local body elections under the leadership of Fadnavis.

In the polls held on 15 January, the BJP won most of the big local bodies all on its own - including Navi Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Pimpri-Chinchwad (the industrial belt near Pune), Sambhajinagar (formerly Aurangabad), Panvel, Dhule, Jalgaon, Solapur, Nanded, and Nashik, among others. Its Mahayuti partner Shiv Sena (led by Eknath Shinde) won hands down in Thane, the other big corporation in Maharashtra after Mumbai and Pune.

In Mumbai, the metro with the largest annual budget of over Rs 74,000 crore, the result seemed mixed, with the BJP winning 89 seats and its Mahayuti partner Shiv Sena (led by Shinde) getting 29 seats - together forming a majority of 118 in a civic body with 227 members. Critics point out that the Uddhav Sena (Shiv Sena - UBT) and cousin Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) got 71 seats in Mumbai. That’s not a bad performance at all.

However, these numbers do not do justice to the Fadnavis win, for the Shinde Sena had little presence in Mumbai, and fielded mostly candidates borrowed from Uddhav’s outfit. It had a strike rate of less than half of the BJP’s 66 percent (89 wins out of 135 contested, versus Shiv Sena’s 29 out of 90, a strike rate of 32 percent).

Some critics claim that the Uddhav-led alliance lost mostly because of the split in the Sena vote. But it is worth recalling that even in the last corporation elections in 2017, the BJP was barely two seats behind the united Shiv Sena. This time, the BJP’s vote share was 21.58 percent, whereas the combined vote share of the Uddhav Sena (13.13 percent), Shinde Sena (5 percent), and MNS (1.37 percent) was 19.5 percent. The conclusion is inescapable: the BJP could conceivably have won even more seats if it had contested alone in the BMC. Shiv Sena was the passenger on the ship in Mumbai, though it was beginning to gain some late traction by enticing candidates from the Uddhav Sena.

A point to note: vote shares of the main parties tend to be low because in corporation elections, where each ward has around 50,000-60,000 voters, independent candidates with local name recognition grab a large chunk of the vote even if they don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. Out of the 5.46 million votes cast in Mumbai, the winning candidates won barely 2.6 million between them). 

A simple point: this was Devendra Fadnavis’s election, and he maxxed his wins despite being generous to Eknath Shinde with seats in Mumbai. This was also an election where no national leaders campaigned for the BJP. It was Fadnavis’s campaign all over, and it was his win, if anybody’s.

Coming back to the Prime Ministerial sweepstakes, unless Modi himself announces a successor, all three - Amit Shah, Devendra Fadnavis, and Yogi Adityanath - have roughly equal chances. Yogi and Fadnavis head the two states with the biggest number of Lok Sabha MPs (80 and 48), while Shah may have control of the organisation. My guess is that if it were to become a tie, the RSS will side with Fadnavis, both because he is relatively non-controversial in nature, and especially if there are allies who need to be propitiated. If the BJP were to fall significantly short of a majority, Fadnavis could be a shoo-in rather than Yogi or even Shah.

He is the man to watch.