In Maharashtra’s fractious politics, the BJP is showing that power lies not in noise, but in deft timing. Maharashtra’s politics has rarely lacked for drama. Alliances fray and reform, and crises appear with theatrical regularity. Yet the state’s current political moment is less about spectacle than about subtlety. Two seemingly unrelated episodes – the grim scandal surrounding a self-styled godman in Nashik and a local council election in Satara - offer a revealing glimpse i

Coalitions, like marriages, are tested less by grand crises than by small humiliations. The ruling Mahayuti – a coalition between the Bharatiya Janata Party, Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena and the late Ajit Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party - has found itself rattled by precisely such an episode. The proximate cause was the election of the Satara Zilla Parishad president. The controversy hinges on allegations that local police prevented some elected members from voting during the