Articles by Suhas Palshikar

The dominance of Maharashtra's politics by the Congress and the Maratha elite had been weakening since 1995, and the triumph of the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party in the assembly elections seems to have finally brought it to an end. Who among the contenders - the Nationalist Congress Party, the Shiv Sena, the BJP, and a Maratha elite now at a distance from both power and its community - will occupy the space vacated by the Congress? More than the defeat of the Congress and the NCP, what marks a new era for the politics of the state is the desertion of Maratha voters from the two Congress parties. In the present scenario, the BJP seems poised to pick its leaders in the state and build a social coalition that will stand by it for some time to come.

A clear majority for the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Lok Sabha and its spread across most states in the 2014 general elections marks a departure from the electoral outcomes of almost a quarter century. The BJP's success was made possible, among other factors, due to its electoral strategy of reinventing social engineering in what may be termed as its second transformation. As a result, it secured significant support among the Other Backward Classes as well as scheduled caste and scheduled tribe voters to gain a winning edge. Besides this, its promise of development and the projection of Modi as a strong and decisive leader attracted support among the lower and middle classes. This will have far-reaching implications to the structure of party competition in the coming years and shape the post-Congress polity. However, enthusiastic over-readings of the mandate would pose a challenge to the BJP even as it searches for ways to entrench itself as a dominant national party in India.

The populist notions that underlie critiques of the practice of representative democracy made by groups like the Aam Aadmi Party have some worrisome aspects. Their ideas of expanding the democratic involvement of citizens are not only romantic, they also tend to undermine political equality. The question that supporters of such "more democracy" need to ask themselves is, do we want to expand democratic rights but effectively restrict their scope?

The apparent resurgence of Marathi nativist politics in and over Mumbai has to be understood in the specific context of the city's history, as well as the larger one of how democratic politics in India has dealt with the issue of diversity inside the nation. The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena and the Shiv Sena build on practices of linguistic localism in India and it requires more than the mere legalism of constitutional rights to understand and fight it.