Heena Sharma Blog

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) less than satisfactory performance in the Assembly elections of Haryana and Maharashtra has once again raised questions on its inept handling of the economy, triggering calls for more focus on it, particularly the rural sector. The sector seems to have played a decisive role in several seats in both the states. Its showing has indicated the continuing slowdown in demand, wages, and consumption in rural areas has started affecting politics. In Haryana, the ruling BJP was marginally short of a majority, just months after it won all the 10 Lok Sabha seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, riding on the Modi wave, while in Maharashtra, the BJP-Shiv Sena saw its seat count go down by 27 from the Assembly elections in 2014. Sources in the ruling party, its ideological fountainhead Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and sister organisations admitted voters had started raising questions on the government’s handling of economic issues, particularly thos...

Few parties manage to stay relevant through a generational change. Shiv Sena is the exception. When it was formed, its founder Bal Thackeray saw it as forum to arouse the Maharashtrian-ness of those who lived in the state, making the Mangalorean, the North Indian, the Tamil, Telugu, and the Malayali the ‘other’. The Communists and the Congress were also targets of Marmik, a cartoon magazine Thackeray founded that poked fun at the outsiders and the meek Maharashtrians. It also gave an ideological cover for breaking the Communist-dominated trade unions in and around Mumbai's textile mills. But he soon found that the ‘Maharashtra for Maharashtrians’ slogan had limited appeal outside Mumbai where non-Maharashtrians were seen as performing an economic service and not necessarily as a threat. A change of track followed with Sena supporters becoming the vanguard of the Hindu movement, speeding ahead of the BJP. Later, owing to the efforts of BJP leader Pramod Mahajan, an agreeme...