The BJP may have established a complete and undoubted majority in Maharashtra's state assembly in the last elections that happened about six months ago, but the party is still very cautious about the upcoming municipal and district council elections in the state because of the experience the BJP-led Mahayuti had in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, particularly in Maharashtra. The Lok Sabha poll result was a big setback for the Mahayuti, which made the BJP go back to the drawing board ahead of the assembly polls and come up with various schemes for the voters. Now, ahead of the civic polls, the ruling party has adopted a new approach—to import many prominent leaders from other parties. This strategy of the BJP has given rise to a new problem: the party is now witnessing a dispute between old loyalists of the BJP and those who have come in from other parties in the recent past.
On Tuesday, a lot of drama was seen in the state capital Mumbai and the city known as the wine capital of India, Nashik, as a prominent former Shiv Sena (UBT) leader from there, Sudhakar Badgujar, travelled from Nashik to Mumbai in the early hours of the day, with thousands of supporters, to attend the joining ceremony at the state BJP headquarters! The drama thus created was mainly because many senior leaders of the state BJP unit kept saying that they were not aware that Badgujar would be joining their party and pointed out that the Nashik unit of the BJP was against this.
And BJP leader from Nashik, Seema Hire, was constantly raising an alarm over Badgujar joining the party. In the last polls, Seema Hire contested on a BJP ticket, and Sudhakar Badgujar was her opponent. Hire won the election. Now the BJP has decided to import Badgujar, who will perhaps be the future main face of the party in a prominent city like Nashik.
During the state assembly session of December 2023, BJP leader Nitesh Rane held a media conference to show some photos and videos of Sudhakar Badgujar allegedly dancing and partying secretly with convicted criminal of the Dawood Ibrahim gang, Salim Kutta. Nitesh Rane demanded the arrest and prosecution of Badgujar. Badgujar was a member of Uddhav Thackeray's Shiv Sena at the time. Rane's demands and allegations created a huge storm in the regional media, and deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, who held the home portfolio, announced that a Special Investigation Team, or SIT, would be formed to investigate Rane's allegations and the visual evidence he presented. About 18 months after all this, Sudhakar Badgujar was welcomed into the BJP at a ceremony attended by the top brass of the party! It is believed that Maharashtra cabinet minister and prominent BJP leader Girish Mahajan facilitated Badgujar's entry into the BJP, with a strategy in mind about the upcoming municipal polls which will happen immediately after the monsoon.
Ironically, state BJP president Chandrashekhar Bawankule, who was asked on Tuesday morning about whether Badgujar was going to join the BJP, informed the media that there was a lot of opposition within the Nashik unit of the BJP about taking Badgujar into the party and that he was not aware whether Badgujar would be joining the party. Five hours after he said this, Bawankule was seen attending the ceremony in Mumbai! All this has exposed the obvious clash within the BJP, which was perhaps happening silently until now. It is a clash between the "insiders", or the BJP old-timers, many of whom have come from the RSS background or the ABVP background, and the "outsiders", or those who have recently joined the party and have been given big positions at the cost of old loyal members, who are perhaps not even aware of their induction into the party till the welcoming ceremony happens.
The clash between the so-called insiders and outsiders is not limited to the Nashik district or any single part of Maharashtra. It is seen all across the state. In Marathwada's Nanded district, a couple of years ago, prominent Congress leader and former chief minister of Maharashtra Ashok Chavan was taken into the BJP and given a Rajya Sabha seat. This shocked many. Old loyalists of the BJP in Nanded and the nearby Beed district, which was late BJP leader Gopinath Munde's home turf, were shocked to see Ashok Chavan entering the BJP and being directly given a parliament seat. The same resentment was seen among the BJP old-timers of western Maharashtra's Pune district, where NCP leader Ajit Pawar's party was taken into the NDA alliance and he was given the finance ministry. In Thane, old-time BJP loyalist and prominent party leader Sanjay Kelkar was seen saying openly that the party should regain its territory in Thane and not leave it for new alliance partners, he was obviously referring to leaders from Eknath Shinde's Shiv Sena. In Navi Mumbai, at one point, Ganesh Naik left Sharad Pawar's NCP and joined the BJP; this disturbed old-time BJP loyalist and party MLA Manda Mhatre and her supporters in a big way. In every part of the state, the BJP is seen importing leaders from other parties, and that disturbs the party old-timers and loyalists.
Observers can clearly see that the BJP bandwagon has become very crowded and heavy in recent years, leading to intense infighting, similar to the one witnessed in the Congress during the UPA regime. How to control the infighting and ease the "insiders" vs "outsiders" dispute in the party is a major challenge facing the top BJP leadership in Maharashtra in the coming years.
Rohit Chandavarkar is a senior journalist who has worked for 31 years with various leading newspaper brands and television channels in Mumbai and Pune.
