The Maharashtra election results were a shock. As Yogendra Yadav put it, the results present a challenge not just to political common sense but to existing election studies models in political science as well. Faced with the unprecedented, unfathomable electoral outcome, analysts soon came up with wildcat explanations, both familiar and unfamiliar. The most popular among them seems to be that giving money to women can beat anti-incumbency, effectively saying that women voters can be easily bought off; if that is so, why wouldn’t the best bidder win? Other explanations abound, which talk about a combination of factors such as the promise of farmer-centric schemes and caste equations. Yet others, including Sharad Pawar, spoke of communal polarisation of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as the game-changer.
What sets Yogendra Yadav’s take apart from the other analyses is his honesty. He is willing to concede that the available data and explanations are far from satisfactory. How can a few welfare measures create such a landslide victory? What was exceptionally communal about this election that was not there in the Lok Sabha elections earlier this year? It is simply impossible for a massive gap of 14% to develop in the vote share based on one Ladli Behna Yojana or one slogan of batenge to katenge (if we are divided, we will break). Even less satisfactory is the idea that pilgrims made the BJP win; and that the Sajjad Nomani saga hurt them. These might have been genuine factors, but there was nothing about either of the factors that made them unprecedentedly effective. As Yogendra points out, Eknath Shinde’s Mahayuti government had many things going against them, but none of them seem to have been reflected in the election results. This was a tsunami election, as Uddhav Thackeray said, and if so, it must have been caused by an earthquake. Yet, no one has detected such an electoral earthquake in Maharashtra before, during, or after the polls.
The common factor in these approaches is that they are all driven by what data is available to them, which in turn is determined by the traditions of psephology. But an exceptional result such as the one in Maharashtra demands an exceptional explanation. There is a better approach to understanding the state than simply trying to make sense of available survey data and one or two communal slogans. A different entry point is needed: one must make sense of the peculiar clustering in the Marathi ideological space to read this election result correctly.
Politics in ideologically charged societies do not often follow rational models of political behaviour, which forces rational observers to conclude that there is something unfathomable at work. The only way to make sense of the 'unfathomable' is to step inside the dominant ideology and view the events from within. In other words, the best way to understand the electoral outcomes in Maharashtra is to look through the fissures in the Hindutva ideological matrix.
INDIA bloc vs NDA, or nationalist Hindutva vs subnationalist Hindutva?
On the face of it, this looked like a reiteration of the INDIA bloc vs NDA contest that is unfolding across India. It was taken for granted that Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) was the Marathi name for INDIA bloc, and Mahayuti was the Marathi name for NDA—these were Indian curries made with Marathi spices. Indeed, nearly all the parties also saw it as such.
The heated fight over seat-sharing was a result of this misplaced outlook. The Congress party’s state chief, Nana Patole, could not arrive at an understanding with Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray). Uddhav Thackeray seemed the obvious choice for the CM face, but there was a strange resistance in the Congress camp. Suddenly, it seemed as if Congress was the party that would make decisions about who the next Maharashtra Chief Minister was to be. Indeed, the role of Uddhav Thackeray as the de facto alliance leader diminished gradually, partially thanks to Uddhav’s party standing by and defending Congress and Rahul Gandhi without reciprocation. The BJP spotted it and alleged that Uddhav was being used only for Congress’s ends, with no autonomy. To make matters worse, Uddhav Thackeray characteristically played down his importance, refusing to stake a claim for chief ministership.
None of the parties in the MVA realised that the biggest divide in Marathi politics was the split within Hindutva. This split reflected a deeper clash between a uniquely Marathi identity with its subnationalist Hindutva and the broader, pan-Indian version of Hindutva. Marathi politics is still following the course set by the split between Shiv Sena and BJP in 2019. Much water has passed under the bridge since, but this is still only the first Assembly election of the ongoing saga, which turned Uddhav Thackeray and Narendra Modi into bitter enemies.
The ideal strategy for MVA was to fight this election as a struggle within Hindutva rather than that of Congress and allies against the BJP, which anchored the contest between Hindutva and Congress secularism. Opposition parties in India, emboldened by their performance in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, forgot the simple fact that, post-2014, India is still under the overwhelming hegemony of Hindutva. With such an ideological dominance on their side, along with the alignment of corporate interests, the BJP and their allies winning elections is the norm, and opposition victories are exceptions. It does not mean that once an ideology achieves supremacy, the adherent parties will automatically win popular mandates; ideology doesn’t cancel politics as such. However, it is undeniable that parties opposed to hegemonic ideologies stand no chance as long as that system prevails. Take, for instance, the dissident groups in the erstwhile Soviet world; they paid lip service to ‘socialism with a human face’ even though they were outright anti-communist. Until the Hindutva hegemony subsides, the opposition parties in India will likely have no choice other than articulating a ‘Hindutva with a human face’.
The arrival of Uddhav Thackeray into the opposition camp actually opened up such a possibility for a Hindutva with a human face, and the last Parliamentary polls proved that it could work in Maharashtra.
The concept of political weight is a useful category here. Some political leaders command disproportionate political weight compared to the number of their followers or the seats they can win. Nitish Kumar is one such leader, and so is Uddhav Thackeray. Their power does not lie in numbers alone but in their unique position in the ideological terrain. The MVA, in the grip of regional Congress leaders, fell for the fiction of the ‘largest party in Maharashtra’, exactly like the BJP did in 2019 and discounted the political weight of Uddhav Thackeray as the heir of Marathi Hindutva and the symbol of Marathi asmita (pride).
The weight of Marathi subnationalist Hindutva
The problem in MVA’s approach can also be understood from the issues that troubled the BJP-Sena alliance and haunted the ‘CM face’ question. It is not based on numbers that Sena supporters demand chief ministership for Shinde—his party has far fewer seats than the BJP. If not numbers, then what could it be? His claim comes from the recognition that the existing political formation demands a Chief Minister who is a Marathi subnationalist through and through. The BJP and Congress look more representative of Indian nationalism than Marathi subnationalism, best articulated by Shiv Sena. No wonder that one of Uddhav’s recurring allegations against Narendra Modi is that he is not just a Gujarati leader but a leader for the Gujaratis and no one else.
The Shinde Sena isn't winning for the hardcore Hindutva of Bal Thackeray, which Eknath Shinde claims to have restored. In any case, if the Marathi people wanted to retain Bal Thackeray's version of the Sena, they would have elected the firebrand Raj Thackeray long ago. But Raj Thackeray’s party has gone down to zero seats in this election. Indeed, Shinde’s Sena recognised this and dropped the posturing around Bal Thackeray after the election results were out. Shinde, like Uddhav, represents a movement that is well beyond his caste and is irreducible to Hindutva, the enduring movement of Marathi subnationalism. The BJP won on the back of Shinde Sena. If it could win Maharashtra on its own, the BJP would not have bothered to split Sena and highlight Shinde as the leader—and it is precisely that which gave Shinde the clout that he had.
This gap also explains the reversal from the previous Lok Sabha election. The MVA contested that election on the implicit understanding that Uddhav Thackeray was the de facto leader of the MVA. The results of the Lok Sabha elections, where the MVA won nearly double the seats compared to Mahayuti, vindicated Uddhav Thackeray’s rebellion. Had the MVA followed through on its unsaid promise and foregrounded Uddhav, we might well have seen a similar wave in this election too.
Once the opposition abstained from addressing this question, it was lost. Especially, the Congress and Sharad Pawar’s NCP read this as a Congress-led election rather than as a referendum on the Hindutva split of 2019. Without recognising this difference in the ideological terrain, MVA did not stand a chance. The promises in question were not just for the resolution of issues such as support prices for farmers and Maratha reservation—they were as much, if not more, about the promise of a Marathi Hindutva. The ideologically discharged nature of this election, in stark contrast to the state’s fiery everyday politics over the past five years, was because of the abdication of this promise by the MVA.
The opposition is expected to tap into the burning question in the polity. In Maharashtra politics, the central unresolved question was whether Uddhav Thackeray was correct to switch sides after obtaining a mandate on a Hindutva platform and whether his Hindutva was legitimate or not. The only reasonable way to have approached this problem is to have foregrounded Uddhav’s split away from the BJP and argued forcefully in support of his loyalty to Marathi subnationalism even within the Hindutva sphere. This would have turned the election into a fight between two Hindutvas—one that was regional, rooted, and forward-looking, and the other invasive and divisive.
By totally ignoring the foundational schism, the MVA was divested of any relevant identity; they were out of touch. They turned this election into a repeat of 2019, where Hindutva won a significant mandate. The polity demanded a resolution to the political question of “which Hindutva” and not the question of ‘INDIA bloc or NDA’, and the MVA refused to offer an answer. Worse, Congress leadership falsely equated the downgrading of Modi’s mandate in 2024 as the downgrading of the status of Hindutva. We are all still un/comfortably in the grip of the Hindutva ideology; the anti-BJP opposition may be able to bypass or circumvent it here and there, but it can’t be cancelled, at least until it breaks down.
The missing factor of ideology in election analyses
Ideology can’t be proven through evidence or facts, it can only be clarified through its expressions. It is not present as a sum total of countable things but structures the very way in which countables themselves operate. Thus, it is difficult for election analysts to take account of how ideology shapes electoral outcomes, and they tend to evade the problem by cancelling it. This tendency explains much of the confusion in explaining the MVA’s rout. Everyone knows Hindutva hegemony exists, but most commentators tend to highlight non-ideological factors to explain away electoral outcomes. Even serious observers of Hindutva tend to reduce it to a communalist ploy useful for polarising votes during elections. The overarching role of Hindutva within its ideological universe is not given its due weightage.
Once we recognise the simple fact that post-2014 Indian elections are fought, won, or lost within the Hindutva matrix, it is not difficult to see how MVA’s twin failures in foregrounding Uddhav Thackeray as the ultimate symbol of Hindutva with a human face and in articulating a subnationalist Marathi Hindutva invited defeat on a platter.
A Rajnikant movie can't run without Rajnikant in the leading role, whoever the director, producer, and cinematographer. Similarly, there can't be an MVA without Uddhav at its helm. So, the Maharashtra Assembly polls was a one-sided election, as the results reflect: MVA sans Uddhav in the leading role cancelled itself, paving the way for an unfathomable victory for the nationalist Hindutva side.
Kuriakose Mathew teaches politics and international relations at PP Savani University, Surat. He holds a Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai. Arjun Ramachandran is a research scholar at the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad. Viplov Wingkar is an assistant professor of philosophy at B K Birla College (Autonomous), Kalyan. Views expressed here are the authors’ own.
