Local BJP Alliances with Congress and AIMIM Are a Mirror of Fadnavis’s Own Playbook
Devendra Fadnavis’s public anger over BJP’s local-level post-poll alliances with the Congress and AIMIM has been framed as a defence of ideology and party discipline. But the outrage feels misplaced and late. What is unfolding across Maharashtra’s municipal councils is not rebellion. It is replication. Local leaders are behaving exactly as recent state-level politics taught them to behave.
The political template in Maharashtra changed decisively when power was secured not through fresh mandates or electoral clarity, but through engineered realignments after the vote. The split in the Shiv Sena and the later fracture of the Nationalist Congress Party were not organic political movements. They were carefully executed exercises in post-poll arithmetic. Numbers mattered more than loyalty. Control mattered more than ideological coherence. Once this method succeeded, it became the most powerful lesson in contemporary Maharashtra politics.
Local BJP leaders did not misunderstand that lesson. They understood it perfectly. They saw that electoral outcomes were no longer final and that political arrangements could be rewritten after results were declared. They saw that moral explanations would follow power, not precede it. Expecting councillors and corporators to suddenly treat municipal verdicts as sacrosanct, while state-level politics was openly fluid, is not realism. It is denial.
The sudden invocation of ideology now exposes a selective standard. Alliances with Congress and AIMIM are portrayed as red lines, even though ideological rigidity was conspicuously absent when state power was being consolidated. Ideology cannot be used as a disciplinary weapon only when the optics turn uncomfortable. Once it is bent at the top, it loses authority everywhere else.
Municipal politics further sharpens this contradiction. Civic bodies function on thin margins, unstable numbers, and constant pressure to form governing majorities. Councillors are not policy architects. They are political survivors. In the absence of clearly communicated, consistently enforced party rules on post-poll alliances, improvisation is not misconduct. It is the default response to uncertainty.
That is why Fadnavis’s anger rings hollow. Threatening disciplinary action without acknowledging the political precedent set by the leadership does not restore discipline. It erodes credibility. Authority flows downward only when responsibility is owned upward. Reprimands without introspection look less like leadership and more like damage control.
The real issue is not Congress or AIMIM. They are convenient villains, not the root cause. The real issue is precedent. Once defections, splits, and post-poll rearrangements were normalised as legitimate tools of governance, the moral architecture of party politics was weakened. What is now visible at the municipal level is simply the downstream effect of that decision.
A genuine course correction is still possible, but it cannot begin with shock or selective outrage. It must begin with clarity. Either ideology is enforced consistently at every level of politics, including when power is at stake at the top, or it must be admitted openly that Maharashtra now operates on arithmetic rather than allegiance. What cannot continue is the pretence that local leaders are at fault for following the very playbook that delivered power to the state leadership. The mirror is clear. Ignoring it will only deepen the crisis.
