Politics

A former Congress veteran, Amarinder resigned from the membership of the grand old party in early November last year one-and-half months after he was unceremoniously replaced with Charanjit Singh Channi as the CM by the Congress leadership in the wake of his protracted tussle with the then state party chief Navjot Singh Sidhu.

After quitting the Congress, Amarinder had floated the PLC in the run-up to the February 20 Punjab Assembly elections. It contested the polls in alliance with the BJP and the SAD (Sanyukt). As per their seat-sharing arrangement, the BJP contested on 65 seats, the PLC on 37 (with a number of candidates preferring to contest on the BJP symbol) and the SAD (Sanyukt) on 15 seats.

All PLC candidates lost badly in the polls , with Amarinder himself losing from Patiala, his bastion. The BJP managed to win two seats, while the SAD (Sanyukt), led by former Rajya Sabha member Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa, drawing a blank. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) swept the elections, in which the Congress was decimated.

Capt Amarinder has been in the political wilderness since the Punjab elections.

On the buzz about the PLC’s upcoming merger with the BJP, Amarinder’s political secretary Major Amardeep, speaking to The Indian Express from London, said, “Let’s wait and watch.”

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had called to inquire about Amarinder’s health on June 27 following his surgery. “It was just a call to inquire about the well-being of Captain Sahib,” he said.

The BJP national executive member, Harjit Grewal, however, asserted that the PLC’s merger with the BJP had been decided before Amarinder went to London and that it will be formally announced once he returns to the country.

“Before leaving for London (for treatment), he (Amarinder) had already conveyed that he will merge PLC with the BJP. We have common ideology of nationalism. He is very close to our ideology. We are also committed to nationalism and he also batted for nationalism,” Grewal told the Express.

Asked when this merger would take place, Grewal said, “It depends on when Capt Amarinder Singh returns. The surgery has been conducted at three points on his spine and it will depend when he can travel this long distance. It will depend on his doctors’ advice. The merger is already on the cards”, adding that “with this merger, BJP will get strengthened at the grass-roots level”.

When pointed out that the PLC could not get much traction during the Punjab polls, Grewal said it was because “there was anti-incumbency against four-and-a-half years rule of Amarinder Singh as the CM”.

He also said: “BJP is strengthening itself for communal harmony in Punjab and to ensure that Punjab remains connected with national mainstream. So, all joining BJP in these efforts are welcome to join the party.”

With this, the TIPRA Motha, which has quickly emerged as the foremost tribal party in the state, is now arguably its largest. Led by Pradyot Kishore Manikya Debbarma, the scion of the erstwhile Tripura royal family, the Motha also heads the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council (TTAADC).

Founded just last year, the TIPRA Motha has put in the shade the IPFT, or Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura. An ally of the BJP, the IPFT with its tribal base was considered a feather in the hat of the ruling party, and helped fuel it to power in the state in 2018.

Before a major chunk of the IPFT, smaller parties like the Tipraland State Party, IPFT Tipraha and the National Conference of Tripura had merged with the Motha.

The TTAADC, now almost entirely controlled by the Motha, is spread across nearly 72% of the state’s area, though it houses only one-third of the state’s population. It gives Motha a say over 20 of the 60 Assembly seats in Tripura that are reserved for STs. In another signal of its popularity, a non-tribal candidate fielded by it from an SC seat in the recent bypolls came second.

The IPFT, which won eight Assembly seats in the 2018 Assembly elections, is now badly bruised after a series of splits as well as cracks down the middle. The latest was provoked by tribal stalwart N C Debbarma declining to acknowledge the election of Mevar Kumar Jamatia as the IPFT president. The Jamatia faction has accused Debbarma of being a BJP stooge, and of diluting the IPFT’s core demand of Tipraland, a separate state for tribals.

Pradyot Kishore and his supporters raise clenched fists in pledge for Greater Tipraland after the joining of IPFT leaders and supporters at Agartala. (Express photo)

Jamatia himself has expressed support for Motha’s Greater Tipraland plank, and while he hasn’t joined Motha, most of his supporters and even his wife have crossed over.

The IPFT supporters who joined the Motha Saturday said the Pradyot Kishore-led party was the only one truly fighting for statehood, and that others too would change sides soon. The Motha has called for ‘thansa’ or unity to achieve this. The defection is also seen as a fallout of the war of upmanship between the two biggest tribal names in the state, Kishore and Debbarma.

One of the leaders now with the Motha is serving IPFT general secretary Dhananjoy Tripura. “We supported the IPFT due to its promise of Tipraland. They moved away, betrayed the people… After September, many more IPFT leaders will come. At least four MLAs are directly in talks with us,” he said.

The Motha’s sweep of the TTAADC elections last year suggests the resonance for the statehood demand among tribal voters. However, unlike the IPFT’s ‘Tipraland’, with its boundaries limited to the peripheries of the TTAADC, Motha’s ‘Greater Tipraland’ version is still largely undefined, with ambitious aims to bring in Tripuri tribes living in Tripura, parts of Assam, Manipur, even neighbouring Bangladesh.

As Opposition parties look for allies, the TIPRA Motha is holding firm that it won’t sit down for talks with anyone without a written understanding on their statehood agenda. On Saturday, Kishore declared: “Without Motha, nobody can form the government in Tripura. It’s my challenge.” He also warned his supporters that if they were not on the winning side, the ruling party (read the BJP) “would not spare us”. Opposition parties have been alleging wide scale violence against them, coinciding with the recent bypolls.

Other parties hope realpolitik will force Kishore to do a climbdown as without significant allies, the Motha can’t dream of taking on the BJP, which still has remnants of the IPFT with it. Most of the leaders of the Motha, including Kishore, have little or no experience of fighting elections. There are also concerns regarding Kishore’s health.

The Congress is among those with its eyes on the Motha, and supported its candidate in the bypolls. A former Congress state president, Kishore had left the party in 2019 after delivering 27% votes to it in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls – a huge jump from 1.7% the year before. The reason for his exit was disagreement over the CAA/ NRC and other issues.

The CPM, that with its Communist stand is against the royals, downplays the appeal of both tribal parties, and their statehood calls as “divisive” and “unsupportable”.

The BJP insists it is not ruffled by the TIPRA Motha’s rise. Spokesperson Nabendu Bhattacharya claimed the party has a strong tribal organisation and was ready to even contest alone, if needed. He also called the Motha “a facade of Left parties” to create unrest and reap political benefit.

The IPFT, meanwhile, is hoping N C Debbarma’s appeal as a time-tested leader will finally prevail over Kishore’s popularity. Debbarma has questioned the Motha’s claims, saying the IPFT’s Tipraland demand is logical, concrete and more acceptable.

Before we dig deeper in the present political minefield, revisiting the state’s recent electoral history will help us understand the ongoing high-stakes battle.

It was in 2019 that the BJP’s central leadership first appeared cold to Fadnavis’s efforts to placate the Shiv Sena, with whom it had an alliance, after the BJP fell short of a majority to form the government on its own. In the 288-member House, the BJP under Fadnavis’s leadership had bagged 105 seats while the Sena had 56. The combine easily crossed the half-way mark of 144. However, the Sena’s claim on chief ministership became a contentious issue, which eventually scuttled the saffron alliance’s chance to retain power. The Sena, interestingly, at no point looked unmanageable. A call or two from PM Narendra Modi or Amit Shah would have been enough to placate Uddhav Thackeray. But it never came, even as the BJP leadership was seen taking every possible step to retain Haryana that went to polls along with Maharashtra.

The BJP’s reluctance was striking vis-a-vis its efforts to grab Haryana that sends just a dozen MPs to Parliament, while ignoring Maharashtra that has four times the number of parliamentary seats of Haryana. It was inexplicable that the BJP’s central leadership was seen engaging much smaller parties, even trying to win over new allies in the northern state and at the same paying no heed to its 30-year partner in Maharashtra and at the Centre. That was the first visible sign that all was not well between Fadnavis and the BJP’s top duo. But why would the BJP risk losing Maharashtra?

The answer to this question is directly linked to this week’s developments. Besides, it also underlines how the central leaderships of national parties, be it the Congress or BJP, view leaders from Maharashtra.

First, about the Sena-BJP tussle. The BJP’s strained relationship with the Sena after the former developed its home-grown Hindu Hriday Samrat is no secret. Till Narendra Modi arrived on the scene, Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray was seen to be the Hindu heart-throb. His cordial relations with the BJP’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani helped both parties stay together for well over three decades. However, after the rise of Modi-Shah, the BJP became more and more unwilling to accommodate any other partner in its Hindutva space. This resulted in friction between the two saffron siblings. Such was the BJP’s zeal to eliminate anyone sharing its Hindutva plank that it had no inhibition in showing willingness even to forge a truce with the NCP to deprive the Sena. With this in mind, the BJP’s central leaders wanted Fadnavis to go solo in the 2019 assembly elections.

In turn, it was Fadnavis’s mistake not to take the cue from the Centre while insisting on a pre-poll alliance with the Shiv Sena. The Uddhav Thackeray-led outfit was a bigger critic for the Fadnavis government than the Opposition. The Sena’s politics of having the cake and eating it too had the BJP leadership enraged. Still, due to Fadnavis’s insistence and the RSS’s wish to avoid a division of Hindu votes, both parties went to polls together only to become each other’s foe in the post-poll scenario. The Sena, citing the 50-50 power-sharing agreement with the BJP, staked its claim on chief ministership, which the latter was unwilling to part with. Thus came into being the three-party alliance in November 2019 wherein the Shiv Sena, Nationalist Congress Party and Congress came together to keep the BJP away. Since then the unforgiving BJP was waiting to settle scores with its former partner and punish the Thackerays.

It did exactly that by installing Eknath Shinde, a veteran from the Thackeray court, in the chief minister’s chair. And while doing so it snubbed its own man, Fadnavis, for his decision to go with the Sena in the 2019 elections. In the process, it also sent a message down the line not to take any position for granted. For the last two-and-half years, Fadnavis had become the face of the state BJP and was on a mission to dislodge the three-party alliance government. He and everyone around him assumed Fadnavis would be chief minister once the Uddhav Thackeray-led government was toppled. It was, however, not to be.

Politically, too, it suits the BJP to have Shinde, a Maratha, as the face of its alliance government instead of Fadnavis, a Brahmin. Fadnavis’s government had to face Maratha wrath and it was believed that the Sharad Pawar-led NCP was instigating the politically dominant community. Shinde’s rise, the BJP thinks, will neutralise the NCP. Besides, it will be much easier for the BJP to beat the Shiv Sena with one of their own. This is the easily visible political optics.

But there’s much more than meets the eye. Capable and promising Marathi leaders, be it in the Congress or in the BJP, have always had their wings clipped the moment they tried to become “national”. In the Seventies it was Yashwantrao Chavan who was not only sidelined but humiliated by Indira Gandhi. Later it was Sharad Pawar with whom the Congress’s first family had uncomfortable ties which eventually forced him to quit the party. And now Fadnavis faces the same fate. If the political grapevine is to be trusted, Fadnavis is paying the price for some of his overzealous supporters’ mistake of coining a slogan ahead of the 2019 elections: “Devendra after Narendra”.

For the Marathi manoos , Delhi continues to be door (faraway), as Fadnavis would have realised by now.

The writer is editor, Loksatta