Maharashtra Assembly elections: In a fragemented electoral field, parties depend on benefits to appeal to voters

Maharashtra Assembly polls focus on benefits programs, women voters, and political fragmentation in a hyper-local election scenario.

The ongoing Assembly polls in Maharashtra are being described as one where political fragmentation, with two Shiv Sena’s, two Nationalist Congress Party’s (NCP) and scores of rebels, independents, is at its peak. Benefits programmes like the Mahayuthi Government’s “Ladki Bahin” and the Maha Vikas Aghadi’s promise of raising the income support to women to ₹3,000 per month if elected, are attempts to add the differentiator of benefits and to surmount the challenge of a hyper-local election.

Women voters, who have emerged as a crucial vote base for parties in the last few years, most recently in the Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka Assembly polls in 2023, are being seen as a vote base that transcends caste and local equations.

Santoshi Joshi, a home maker in Balkum in Thane, is one of the beneficiaries of the Ladki Bahin scheme of the Mahayuthi-led Government. “I have received money under the scheme and it has been useful to me in that I could pay my son’s school fees, and get some diabetes medicine for myself,” she said. When asked to identify who she sees as the main benefactor among the trifecta of leaders in the Mahayuthi, she unequivocally mentions Chief Minister Eknath Shinde. Several others in her locality are also beneficiaries.

In Dasak village of Nashik, Sandhya Suryawanshi, hasn’t received the benefits, but is confident of getting them since “many in our village have received”. She was handicapped by the fact that she hadn’t yet opened a bank account. “I have applied but there was such a rush to open accounts that the bank said they needed to clear up the backlog first,” she said. Refusing to commit to any political party in the polls, she is, however, hopeful of getting some cash in hand.

The confused and confusing situation on the ground is exemplified by the fact that apart from the two big alliances with three parties each, smaller outfits like the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA), the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), there are 50 rebel candidates as well. Of these rebels, 26 are from the ruling Mahayuthi combine of the BJP, the Shiv Sena (Shinde), and the Nationalist Congress Party (Ajit Pawar), with 18 from the MVA of the Shiv Sena (UBT), the NCP (SP) and the Congress.

In this fragmented scenario, it appears that parties are turning the polls into a benefits election rather than an ideological one.

According to Professor Deepak Pawar, head of the department for civics and politics at the University of Mumbai, there has been an “erosion of ideology” across the spectrum, in the context of the breaks in alliances that followed the 2019 Assembly polls. “Both the MVA’s manifesto and the Mahayuthi, has spoken of benefits. The MVA, before the imposition of the Model Code of Conduct, spoke of State finances and unsustainability of the these benefit but now there appears to be a consensus across parties that these benefits are necessary to engender a ‘positive mood’ amongst the electorate,” he said.