Governing the Marathas.

The Maratha Empire was never an empire (except perhaps when it was birthed by Ch Shivaji and even he had to negotiate and come to terms with thr various Deshmukhs using saam-daam-dand-bhed,, a set of skills he was amazingly adept at). It was what most astute observers (and rulers, both of the Marathas and others) realised quickly seeing the entrepreneurial (military and political) nature of regional satraps and warlords: a confederacy. In essence, you cannot rule over Maharashtra. You can only hope to govern it. For a period of time.

Uddhav is a nice man (nicer than I had thought earlier, and continue to do so, despite my fear, nay expectation, that he will turn any day now). But he needs to learn from Pawar how to run a political outfit in Maharashtra. Or he could take a leaf out of his own father’s book. Anyway you look at it, Maharashtra must be run like India, or Europe, by perceiving and treating it as a group of disparate people with a vaguely common history and even more vaguely common aspirations and interests. The trick is to sew, and hold, it all together despite the differences that show up at the fraying seams. Uddhav has failed in this regard.

Don’t get me wrong. I still am rooting for him. But I am finding it increasingly difficult to believe that almost every one of his MLAs has defected for fear or greed and none of them have any ideological differences with him or his choices, or indeed style of functioning, something they have said again and again, even before this BJP-triggered crisis.

Money and threats, and the BJP has plenty of both, can only go so far. I am not sure all the MLAs are either scared of ED or bought off. Some, initial ones, probably are. Their leader (the creepy, untrustworthy, shifty-eyed Shinde) most certainly looks like he is. But once the pump was primed and the initial 15-20 MLAs deserted, I believe the rest quit solely through the force of two things: argument that the deserters indeed have a point about UT’s lack of effective leadership, and of course, peer pressure, if you can all it that (I mean, an MLA is a person that has an eye for where the majority is going and slowly moving their own self towards that side, right? I mean, that’s the literal skillset of someone who can win an election in a modern democracy).

I may still be wrong. Shiv Sena is a cadre-based outfit and its reach is deep as it is wide. There are capable and ready second and third rung leaders available to Udhhav to rebuild the organisation. Secondly, he can go directly to the people on the ground and use the social capital his father built (I mean, isn’t that what the rebels are also trying to usurp and build their case on?), not to mention the tremendous goodwill he built as a Covid CM himself. Thirdly, he could dissolve the assembly (could he though? Koshiyari isn’t exactly pliable) and fight again. Or he could do something completely different. And dramatic. Like accede to the demands of his party’s MLAs and join hands with the BJP, this time as a severely limited, humiliated, and demoted junior partner, while being like the erstwhile Maratha Kings who sat on their gaddi at the pleasure of the Peshwas, even if technically, it was the other way around. What he will choose (if at all the choice is his, or any choice remains in the matter at all), I don’t know.

All I know is he needs to act fast. And he needs to understand that Maharashtra can only be governed by compromise, consensus, and cunning. Not by merely being a nice man.