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By:

Abhijit Mulye

21 August 2024 at 11:29:11 am

Mahayuti struggles with seat-sharing formula

Mumbai: The ruling Mahayuti alliance is currently navigating a treacherous political minefield. With the crucial Legislative Council elections rapidly approaching, deep-seated differences over seat-sharing have surfaced. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Monday offered a candid admission of these unresolved disputes. His statements underscore the immense pressure on the coalition partners. The state is preparing to vote for sixteen council seats and one bypoll seat in Nagpur. Voting is...

Mahayuti struggles with seat-sharing formula

Mumbai: The ruling Mahayuti alliance is currently navigating a treacherous political minefield. With the crucial Legislative Council elections rapidly approaching, deep-seated differences over seat-sharing have surfaced. Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Monday offered a candid admission of these unresolved disputes. His statements underscore the immense pressure on the coalition partners. The state is preparing to vote for sixteen council seats and one bypoll seat in Nagpur. Voting is scheduled for June 18, with the all-important counting set for June 22. Addressing the media after inaugurating the Jawahar Balbhavan in Mumbai, Fadnavis sought to project a calm exterior. He emphasised that detailed discussions are still ongoing to evaluate various aspects of the electoral battle. He expressed confidence that the alliance would soon reach an amicable solution. However, the specific geographies he mentioned reveal the exact fault lines. Negotiations with the Shiv Sena are heavily concentrated on Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar and Nashik. Meanwhile, talks with the Nationalist Congress Party are focused squarely on Pune. Alliance Arithmatic The arithmetic of the alliance is proving incredibly difficult to balance. The Shiv Sena had firmly demanded seven seats even as the BJP was offering only 3. They justify this claim by pointing to their strong support bases in Mumbai, Thane, Raigad, Sambhajinagar, Ratnagiri, Nashik, and Yavatmal. The Bharatiya Janata Party has a vastly different calculation. The BJP plans to assert its dominance by contesting twelve seats. This aggressive stance would leave only three seats for the Sena and a mere two seats for the Sunetra Pawar-led NCP. With the nomination process already underway, the clock is ticking loudly for the Mahayuti leadership. This intense internal friction prompted a sudden political maneuver by Deputy Chief Minister and Shiv Sena chief Eknath Shinde. He flew to New Delhi over the weekend amid the escalating deadlock. Sena sources indicated that Shinde sought the intervention of the BJP’s central leadership. A Sena minister, however, quickly tried to downplay the optics of the trip. He insisted that Shinde travelled for an unscheduled programme before heading to Bengaluru for a planned event. Despite these official denials, the timing strongly suggests a high-stakes crisis intervention. Bitter Conflict The most bitter conflict within the alliance centers on the Thane local authorities constituency. Both the BJP and the Shinde-led Sena are fiercely staking their claims. A BJP legislator recently argued that political tickets should be distributed based strictly on numerical strength. He pointed out that the BJP commands 444 corporators in the region. In stark contrast, the Shinde-led Sena and the allied Jijau organisation possess a combined total of only 346 corporators. However, political reality in Maharashtra is rarely dictated by numbers alone. The Shinde faction views Thane as its emotional and traditional stronghold. Surrendering this territory to their alliance partner is considered politically unthinkable. This local dispute is already threatening to severely damage the broader coalition. A Sena Member of Parliament recently issued a stark warning regarding the upcoming Thane Zilla Parishad elections. He boldly asserted that Sena workers are fully prepared to fight alone and hoist their saffron flag, regardless of the alliance’s survival. The battle lines are extending further across the state map. The Sena is demanding the Jalgaon seat, which the BJP is equally determined to contest. Furthermore, reports suggest the Sena is preparing to unilaterally field a candidate in Raigad. This would further complicate the already delicate negotiations. Despite these mounting tensions, BJP minister Girish Mahajan has publicly maintained that the deadlock will be resolved shortly. A final decision now rests on an impending high-level meeting between Fadnavis, Shinde, and Sunetra Pawar. MVA Crisis Meanwhile, the political turbulence is not restricted to the Mahayuti alliance. The opposition Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi is dealing with its own severe crisis in the Vidarbha region. The Chandrapur-Gadchiroli council seat has triggered frantic political poaching. As many as sixty corporators and Zilla Parishad members from the Congress party reportedly went missing recently. Congress leaders have directly accused BJP legislator Banti Bhangadiya of orchestrating this disappearance. They allege he has shifted the corporators to an undisclosed location to manipulate the voting outcome. The Congress has responded with an aggressive counter-narrative. Senior Congress leader Vijay Wadettiwar made a startling claim that over one hundred BJP corporators are secretly in contact with him. While Wadettiwar strategically hid their exact whereabouts, his statement highlighted a critical vulnerability. He suggested that the BJP is also suffering from severe internal factionalism. Wadettiwar warned that these hidden rifts will ultimately cost the ruling party dearly in the forthcoming elections.

Elite Impunity

The Epstein files test whether Donald Trump will confront the machinery of power or quietly manage it.

Jeffrey Epstein’s afterlife is being managed with care. The latest disclosure in form of 19 photographs from Epstein’s estate with faces blacked out and meaning suspended, serves as a reminder that the real test lies ahead, when the state must decide how much of the truth it is prepared to tolerate.


What matters is not whether Americans will once again gawp at images of presidents, princes and plutocrats orbiting a disgraced financier. It is whether America will finally show that power does not still buy silence.


For President Donald Trump, the Epstein files arrive as a moral and institutional reckoning that exposes the limits of his populist claim to be a scourge of elites. The president has long insisted that Epstein’s scandal proves how a decadent liberal establishment protects its own.


Epstein’s notoriety never rested on secrecy. Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bill Gates, Larry Summers and a parade of tycoons, academics and political fixers have long been associated with him. Most deny wrongdoing; some have suffered reputational damage; a few have been formally disgraced. Yet the central mystery has endured since Epstein secured his astonishingly lenient plea deal in 2008: how did a man accused of trafficking underage girls operate for decades while the institutions meant to restrain him repeatedly failed?


The forthcoming release of the so-called Epstein files, compelled by Congress and reluctantly accepted by the Trump administration, promises answers. It may expose prosecutorial hesitation, investigative blind spots and the internal correspondence that explains why leads went cold. Survivors are hoping for recognition, but hopes of a neat reckoning are misplaced. Bureaucratic truth rarely arrives with drama.


That is precisely the risk. Transparency laws can be obeyed while being hollowed out. The Justice Department retains wide latitude to redact material in the name of victim protection, ongoing investigations or national security. These limits are also the traditional refuge of embarrassment disguised as caution.


The politics surrounding the disclosure are tawdry. Republicans once cast Epstein as proof that liberal elites were shielded by a corrupt establishment. Democrats now deploy selective releases to pressure a Republican administration that initially dismissed the affair as a partisan hoax. President Trump’s own oscillation - from derision to reluctant compliance - underscores the problem. When transparency becomes a weapon rather than a principle, justice becomes collateral damage.


The photographs themselves symbolise this confusion. Devoid of captions or chronology, they invite insinuation without explanation. They satisfy public appetite for spectacle while postponing understanding. Publishing them may bruise reputations, but it does little to answer the harder questions: who enabled Epstein financially, who smoothed his path with prosecutors, and why federal agencies failed to connect evidence already in their possession?


The deeper scandal is structural. Epstein thrived not merely because he was rich, but because he understood access. He connected donors to politicians, academics to patrons, social climbers to gatekeepers.


His death in custody in 2019, ruled a suicide amid extraordinary security failures, removed the central defendant while intensifying public mistrust. It ensured that the reckoning would shift from criminal guilt to institutional failure. If the forthcoming disclosures merely confirm that mistakes were made and procedures misunderstood, they will entrench the belief that justice bends towards status.


For Trump, the danger is not legal exposure but moral contradiction. He rose by railing against elite impunity, promising to smash closed systems. Yet as President, he now presides over the management of disclosure, deciding how much sunlight the public is allowed. Heavy redactions will be read as proof that the system remains intact and that Trump chose to administer it rather than dismantle it.


In the long view, the Epstein files will mark a revealing moment in Trump’s presidency. They will be remembered less for what they uncovered than for what remained obscured. Epstein’s empire flourished on silence, ambiguity and institutional reluctance. Whether those habits finally end or are merely refined will define not just this scandal, but the credibility of power itself.


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