Abhijit Joshi

The Congress’ tie-up with the Vanchit Bahujan Aaghadi tests whether old social coalitions can be rebuilt from the panchayat upwards. The forthcoming Maharashtra local bodies’ polls for Nagar Parishads and Nagar Panchayats, normally governed by hyper-local quarrels and ward-level patronage, have become unusually momentous. The reason is a political experiment where the Congress party has chosen to ally with the Vanchit Bahujan Aaghadi (VBA), Prakash Ambedkar’s Ambedkarite outfit, in several...

The Congress dithers and the BJP calculates as the Thackeray cousins weigh their next move as civic polls loom. Politics in Maharashtra has long been a study in timing - the art of knowing when to provoke, when to retreat, and when to deploy the nuisance value of allies and adversaries. For decades, the Congress excelled at this game. In Maharashtra, this mastery produced a delicate choreography with Balasaheb Thackeray’s Shiv Sena. Often derided as the Congress’s ‘B-team,’ or ‘Vasant Sena’...

Maharashtra’s local body polls will decide not just who governs its towns but which parties will dominate its politics in the future. The announcement by Maharashtra’s State Election Commission of the schedule for the long-delayed local body polls saw the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) campaign machinery in full swing. The party activated its committees and immediately mobilized its workers in stark contrast to the reactive strategies of its rivals. The opposition - an uneasy...