- Senior BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis said numbers matter more than ideology in politics
- Comment included a reference to Bihar politician Prashant Kishor, who flopped in the state election
- Kishor's Jan Suraaj refused to ally with any party and finished with zero wins from 238 seats
Senior BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis offered Jan Suraaj boss Prashant Kishor a life lesson Monday - 'numbers over ideology, always, in politics' - after his party's heavy defeat in the Bihar election.
"There are two ways to run a democracy... through ideology or through numbers. But you cannot propagate an ideology without numbers," the Maharashtra Chief Minister - who leads a three-party coalition of the BJP, Eknath Shinde's Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar-led NCP - said at a public event.
"Prashant Kishor talked about ideology... but he didn't get any seats. You have to be practical in politics. Relevance is key. And that needs numbers," the Chief Minister said.
Fadnavis' thoughts on alliances are key given the turbulent recent history of Maharashtra politics, which has seen three-party coalitions - the BJP-led Mahayuti and the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi, which includes the Congress and Sharad Pawar's NCP, running the past two governments.
The Mahayuti was formed over 2022 and 2023 after, in nearly identical sequence of events, the Shinde and Paware triggered splits within the Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party. They led defectors to the BJP' and causing the then-ruling MVA government, with Uddhav Thackeray at the helm, to fall.
Fadnavis was widely credited with engineering those splits.
And his skill in that space will be called into play again as the BJP and its allies plan for the Mumbai civic body election. There is already talk of a Devendra Fadnavis-Eknath Shinde rift - over the choice of some office-bearers; and another between Fadnavis and Ajit Pawar - over promises to voters.
"Our ideologies may not match... but we can run the government on a common minimum programme," he said and pointed to the 1990s, when India had six different prime ministers. "We've matured from then," he said, underlining (evident in the BJP's election record in the past decade) his party's flexibility.
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Poll strategist-politician Kishor's party won zero seats despite contesting in 238.
He also refused to join the opposition alliance - led by Tejashwi Yadav and the Rashtriya Janata Dal - raking up the 'jungle raj' charge also levelled by the Bharatiya Janata Party and, simultaneously, reasoning it had limited pull with voters beyond its core base of Muslims and Yadavs.
As it turned out, Kishor was right about that; the RJD slumped to an embarrassing low of 25 seats - 50 fewer than it got in the 2015 poll. But the RJD's result was still significantly better; Lalu Yadav's party is the third-largest in the House and picked up 23 per cent of the votes.
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The Jan Suraaj got zero seats and less than 3.5 per cent of the votes.
Kishor made it clear well before the two-phase election, telling NDTV on November 1 that the Jan Suraaj would not ally with any party, either before or after the poll. He even gave it in writing.
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Asked to predict the Jan Suraaj's haul, he had said, "I see two probabilities... we will win either fewer than 10 or more than 150 seats. People see Jan Suraaj as an alternative..."
But he also confessed every vote requires a leap of faith from that voter, a difficult ask given the "prolonged phase of hopelessness" - a jab at both the ruling and opposition alliances.
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