Over a fifth of Maharashtra’s 288 assembly seats—62 to be precise—come from Vidarbha, and Congress and BJP are locked in a direct contest in 36 of them.
It is often said in political circles that Vidarbha may be further away from Maharashtra’s capital city—Mumbai—than from the capitals of several neighbouring states, such as Madhya Pradesh or Telangana, but, at the same time, the road to Mumbai’s Mantralaya goes through Vidarbha. In other words, the party that dominates Vidarbha dominates the state.
Sources from both the BJP and Congress independently say that in an election where every seat and every vote counts, both parties aim for at least 30-35 seats in Vidarbha. The BJP is contesting 47 seats in the region, while the Congress is fighting in 40 seats.
Largely an agrarian society, Vidarbha has traditionally been a Congress bastion. Its centre, Nagpur, is where Dr. B.R. Ambedkar converted to Buddhism in 1956 and where the headquarters of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the BJP’s ideological parent, stands. It is also the region from which Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Congress’s Rahul Gandhi launched their campaigns for the Maharashtra polls this time.
The BJP made inroads in the region by officially giving legitimacy to a long-standing demand for carving out Vidarbha as a separate state—a demand that’s nowhere in the party’s narrative in the region now—and by getting the large Other Backward Classes (OBC) population of Vidarbha to rally behind it.
In 1996, the then BJP-Shiv Sena alliance punched its first major triumph in the region, winning all but two Lok Sabha seats there. Since then, the Congress has not regained the kind of grip that it used to enjoy in the region. However, in the last four years, the party has been showing signs of a revival in Vidarbha, with this year’s Lok Sabha election, in particular, giving it a boost.
Out of the ten Vidarbha seats in the Lok Sabha election, the Congress won five, and the BJP won two seats. Overall, the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), which includes the Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) and the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), won seven Vidarbha seats. The Mahayuti, which includes the BJP, the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar-led NCP, secured only three.
The BJP leaders attribute several local reasons for their defeat in Vidarbha in the Lok Sabha poll, other than what they call a “fake narrative” of the Opposition across the state about the BJP regime posing a danger to the Constitution and caste-based reservations. For instance, there was anger among soybean and cotton farmers over getting low prices for their produce. The OBCs, especially Kunbi voters, did not rally behind the BJP too. Moreover, the party’s candidate selection in some seats was “erroneous”, and the RSS largely stayed out of the party’s campaign.
“The Lok Sabha election was a wake-up call, and we have been more vigilant in making repairs on all fronts,” a Nagpur-based BJP leader, who looks after the party’s affairs in the larger Vidarbha region, told ThePrint.
Congress’s bounce-back in an old bastion
The BJP performed the best in Vidarbha—a region of eleven districts, ten Lok Sabha seats and 62 assembly seats—back in 2014. It swept the parliamentary seats, edging the Congress out, and won 44 assembly seats later that year. Fighting solo, it contested 61 assembly seats in Vidarbha in 2014.
The party lost some momentum in the region in the 2019 assembly election. In the Lok Sabha polls, it won nine of the ten seats. However, in the assembly election, its tally fell to 29. The party, in an alliance then with the undivided Shiv Sena, fought 50 assembly seats in Vidarbha in 2019.
The Congress started registering minor victories in the region to claw its way back from 2020 onwards. By then, the MVA government was in power, and the Congress strongmen from Vidarbha—Nana Patole, Nitin Raut, and Sunil Kedar—were state cabinet ministers.
With its ally NCP, the Congress swept the Nagpur Zilla Parishad election in 2020. It won 30 of 58 seats, and the NCP secured 10, whereas the BJP got 15. The same year, the Congress won the Nagpur division graduates’ constituency election for the Maharashtra Legislative Council, bagging a seat once with BJP Union Minister Nitin Gadkari, who hails from Nagpur.
In 2021, the Congress defeated the BJP in Zilla Parishad and Panchayat Samiti bypolls in the Nagpur district. In 2022, the Congress outperformed the BJP in the election to the post of chairpersons of Panchayat Samitis and Zilla Parishads in Nagpur.
After the Congress’s strong 2024 Lok Sabha performance in Vidarbha, at least two party leaders from the region told ThePrint in confidence that there was nothing vastly different the party did on the ground in terms of preparation or mobilisation of cadre. A strong anti-BJP sentiment on the ground consolidated itself into a pro-Congress vote.
Speaking to ThePrint on Thursday, Maharashtra Congress President Nana Patole said, “Vidarbha has always been with the Congress. For the last two elections, the BJP rose a bit in Vidarbha, but the BJP could not fulfil the wishes of the people of Vidarbha based on which they had elected the party. The BJP has only hurt Vidarbha. So, the people of Vidarbha think that Congress is the only party that can do justice to them. The situation in Vidarbha is that even Devendra Fadnavis can lose his seat.”
Patole, an Other Backward Classes (OBC) leader from Vidarbha, is contesting this election from the Sakoli assembly constituency in the Bhandara district.
Congress sources say what hurt the party the most in Vidarbha in the years that the BJP grew stronger was the infighting among its leaders—a familiar weakness of the party in several parts of Maharashtra—and a lack of resources to match the BJP, particularly since 2014 when it came to power at the Centre, and a robust ground network.
“Everywhere, factionalism has existed within the Congress. But the party has still survived because there is a certain competition due to factionalism,” former MP and Union Minister Vilas Muttemwar told ThePrint, sitting at his Nagpur residence, with a large portrait of Mahatma Gandhi behind him.
He added: “But there was an unsaid rule that till you get the ticket, you fight, for yourself, for your people to get the ticket, but after the ticket allocation, you fall in line and work for the Congress. But this new rung of leaders is indulging in a tug of war, trying to cut each other.”
At Nagpur, as Prafulla Gudadhe Patil, who, Patole says, can oust Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis from the Nagpur South West constituency, makes his way for a padayatra in the Surendranagar neighbourhood, he lists several factors that may work for him this election. Primarily, the “non-availability of the incumbent MLA and development that only benefits his aides commercially”.
He also talks about how the BJP built its fortunes in Vidarbha on the back of the OBC community, which, he says, is now disillusioned with the party.
“The BJP built its base on the strength of its OBC karyakarta, but once the party came to power, the community did not get anything in power sharing. So, now they have shifted their narrative to consolidation based on religion. Banners have been put up in front of temples, saying people must vote if the temple has to be kept secure in the future,” said Gudadhe Patil, a low-profile seasoned corporator, whose father Vinod Gudadhe Patil was once a core BJP member and the party’s first MLA from Nagpur.
He is also aware of what he is up against.
“I cannot fight the kind of resources that the BJP has. Structurally, we do not have the kind of might that they do. We have an organisation on the ground. There are karyakartas on every booth, but it is not as robust,” said Gudadhe Patil, who has been mainly campaigning through padayatras, going door to door, in his constituency.
“I do not have much of what the BJP has. I go to people with folded hands and on my two feet to hear them out. People have seen my politics, and they have also seen Fadnavis’ politics,” added Gudadhe Patil, who took on Fadnavis from the Nagpur South West constituency in 2014.
BJP’s damage control
From the point of view of the BJP leaders in Vidarbha, one of the notable differences between the Lok Sabha and assembly polls this year is the active involvement of the RSS in strategy and campaign.
“A father usually tells his son what to do and what not to do. If the son does not listen once, the father might try telling him once more. If the son still does not listen, the father says okay, do what you want. But, after doing what he wants, if the son gets into trouble, the father steps up and helps him. Exactly this happened between the RSS and the BJP,” a party functionary from Vidarbha, who did not wish to be named, said.
He added that the RSS usually plays the role of disaster management for the BJP. In the Lok Sabha election, he said, the narrative that the BJP would change the Constitution if it came to power kept gaining ground, “but the father remained miffed with the son, and there was no help in disaster management”.
This time, cadres say, the RSS leadership has been involved in the candidate selection and campaign since July.
After the Lok Sabha election, the BJP team in Vidarbha called 500 voters in every constituency randomly to create a database of what went wrong for the party, a second BJP leader, who did not wish to be named, said.
“We also did a more stringent verification of our booth pramukh and panna pramukh level machinery. The system had been on the ground, but we had taken it for granted a bit,” the leader said.
According to the party’s internal estimates, it aims to win 30-35 of the 47 seats it is contesting in Vidarbha. At least 18-20 of these, leaders say, are their ‘A-category’ seats—definite wins. Roughly ten more are in the ‘B category’—seats the party hopes to win with some effort.
Overall, according to the BJP’s internal calculations, of Vidarbha’s 62 seats, 48 are such that the BJP has won them at some point or other between the 2009, 2014 and 2019 elections. Roughly eight others are such that the party has never won but has come second in, and five are such that the BJP has never won but has come third in.
The impact of the soybean and cotton distress, BJP leaders say, would be limited to four assembly constituencies in Wardha and three in Nagpur rural. The party hopes to counter it by highlighting the Centre and state government’s measures for farmers.
The Centre approved the procurement of 13 lakh metric tonnes of soybean under the price support scheme and, just last week, approved the procurement of soybeans with higher moisture. The Maharashtra government had rolled out a relief package for cotton and soybean farmers.
The BJP has also been banking on schemes such as the flagship Ladki Bahin. The state gives Rs 1,500 to eligible women per month under the scheme and free solar pumps for farmers. If elected to power, the Mahayuti has promised to raise the Ladki Bahin payout to Rs 2,100/month.
“Between the Lok Sabha and assembly elections, the environment has changed. The Ladki Bahin scheme is a major factor. Earlier, the audience in rallies used to be nearly 25 percent women. It is roughly 50 percent women now,” Parinay Fuke, a senior Nagpur-based BJP leader and party MLC, told ThePrint.
“In the last election, we went wrong in candidate selection in a few seats. Moreover, the Congress mostly fielded Kunbi candidates in east Vidarbha, so the community rallied with them. We have been more cautious this time,” he added.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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