Narendra Sastry | India Tomorrow
Mumbai, September 8 – With just a few days to go for the Election Commission to come out with a schedule for the State Assembly polls due next month, the ruling BJP and Shiv Sena are struggling to arrive at an understanding over the sharing of seats for the Assembly polls.
Though the two parties had agreed to share equal number of seats for the state Assembly polls, the BJP is now in no mood to set aside 135 seats to the Shiv Sena on the ground that since it had won 122 seats as against 63 seats won by the Sena in the 2014 polls, it deserved more number of seats than the Uddhav Thackeray-led party.
Having begun closed-door meetings, the differences between the BJP and Shiv Sena over the seat-sharing are coming to the fore. The Shiv Sena is insisting that the seats be shared between the two parties for the Assembly polls on a 50:50 ratio, as had been decided at a joint meeting that BJP president Amit Shah andChief Mminister Devendra Fadnavis had with Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray on February 18 this year when the two parties formalised the seat-sharing pact for the Lok Sabha polls.
Later on June 2, senior BJP leader and now State party president Chandrakant Patil had brought clarity to the seat-sharing deal by saying that the BJP and Shiv Sena would contest 135 seats each in the State Assembly polls, setting aside the remaining 18 seats for their allies.
However, the BJP – which is a senior partner in the saffron alliance – has reservations about honouring its earlier commitment to the Shiv Sena. No wonder it is giving a new spin to the 50: 50 seat sharing formula.
Fadnavis is understood to have conveyed to the Shiv Sena leadership that both parties would retain (the BJP-122 and Sena -63) that they had won in the 2014 polls when they had contested separately on their own strength. This in effect means that with 185 seats won collectively by the two parties out of the purview of talks, the talks would be on the remaining 103. The BJP wants the remaining seats, after sharing some seats with the allies.
If the BJP were to have its way, it would contest nearly 160 seats, leaving around 110 seats to the Shiv Sena. The two parties will leave the remaining 18 seats their allies.
However, the Shiv Sena is not ready to accept the revised formula proposed by the BJP. It wants to share 135 seats each with the BJP, leaving the remaining 18 seats to the allies. “We will go by whatever that had been decided at my meeting with Amit Shah and Fadnavis in February this year (when the two parties had agreed for 50:50 sharing of seats),” Uddhav has said many times.
The Sena’s argument is that it has always been the senior partner in the alliance for the Assembly till 2014 when the two parties contested separately after their seat-sharing talks failed.
On its part, the Shiv Sena has all along invoked the 1995 Assembly poll seat-sharing formula under which it had contested 169 seats leaving the remaining 116 seats to the BJP and got the chief minister’s post after coming to power in that elections.
The chief minister’s post is another bone of contention between the BJP and Sena. Fadnavis has made it clear to the Sena that the top post, which he occupies, would remain with the BJP, but has offered to give the deputy chief minister’s post to the Shiv Sena (read Aditya Thackeray). Such is the BJP’s stand that it does not want to share the chief minister’s post even on rotational basis – the post will remain with the BJP for the first two years and it will be with the Shiv Sena for the next two and a half years.
Though both the BJP and Shiv Sena leaders are maintaining that they will ink the seat-sharing pact smoothly, available pointers from the two parties suggest that the negotiators will face a lot of hurdles during the ongoing talks.
On its part, the BJP has kept ready its plan B – of going it alone in the polls as it had done in the 2014 polls—and the Shiv Sena will also not be averse to contesting on its own strength. In the Plan-B situation, the two parties will in likelihood would come together after the Assembly elections as they had done in 2014.
All said and done, it remains to be seen as to how soon the BJP and Shiv Sena formalise their seat-sharing tie-up and if the parties will contest the Assembly polls separately.
