After weeks of tough talk and posturing over Cabinet berths and portfolios, the >Shiv Sena , for all its efforts, appears to have got very little from the Bharatiya Janata Party. The Sena joined the Devendra Fadnavis government without its major demands being met; the party will not have a deputy chief minister, nor will it get the home portfolio. For sure, the BJP needed the numbers of the Sena as the “unconditional support” of the Nationalist Congress Party, a scam-tainted foe-turned-friend, was neither reliable nor desirable. But the cushion of the NCP’s support came in handy for the BJP during its negotiations with the Sena. Out of power for 15 long years, the Sena was under pressure from its own middle rung to join the government. There was also the fear of desertion from its ranks of MLAs and a rush to the BJP, clearly a party on the rise in Maharashtra. Moreover, a total break with the BJP would have made its continuance in the BJP-led government at the Centre untenable. After all, unlike in Maharashtra, the BJP had a majority of its own in the Lok Sabha and the Sena was a crutch that could be thrown away. Indeed, the Sena was the loser when it sought to link its participation at the Centre to sharing power in Maharashtra. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was unmoved by the regional party’s decision to withdraw its nominee from the list for last month’s >expansion of the Union Council of Ministers , and, in a snub, included a Sena dissident, Suresh Prabhu, after enrolling him in the BJP.
However, the patch-up between the two saffron parties will constantly be under strain, not only because of the bitterness of the last few months, but also because of their competing ambitions. The Sena is now playing second fiddle to the BJP because it has no other choice, but sooner or later the party would want to recapture its lost space as the premier Hindutva party in Maharashtra. The two parties parted ways before the Assembly election because the BJP was unwilling to concede the Sena’s demand to declare its pramukh Uddhav Thackeray as the chief ministerial candidate of the saffron alliance. Despite the beating it took in the election, the Sena will, therefore, not be reconciled for too long to remaining a junior partner of the BJP in Maharashtra. Just as the patch-up was an event foretold, given the way the numbers fell in the Assembly after the election, so too strains and counter-pulls in the alliance are inevitable. The Sena and the BJP can be in the government together for a long while, but when the next election comes they may have to take a hard decision to either go together or part ways. It is to be hoped that their fight for the same political space would not hamper governance.