Frayed Front

Nearly six years after Maharashtra’s Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) was stitched together in an improbable bid to keep the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) out of power, the alliance looks more frayed than formidable. The Congress’s declaration that it will fight the coming Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) election on its own made just a day after the Opposition’s bruising defeat in Bihar has triggered a crisis of confidence within the coalition. For a partnership already defined by uneasy compromises, shifting rivalries and ideological incoherence, the move feels less like a tactical divergence and more like an early marker of endgame.

Mumbai Congress leaders have long chafed at the arrangements that the MVA imposed from above. The city’s Congress cadre believes the party brass has ceded too much ground to Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT) and Sharad Pawar’s NCP (SP). That the BMC is India’s richest civic body, commanding a budget larger than that of some small states, immeasurably heightens the stakes.

The Congress’s allies have urged the party to show ‘magnanimity’ after the Bihar debacle, hoping to prevent fissures from widening in Maharashtra. Instead, the Congress doubled down by declaring it would field candidates in all 227 BMC seats and adopt a similar stance in other municipal bodies. The obvious inference is that the Congress wants to test its own strength, reclaim its urban footprint and resist becoming a junior partner in perpetuity.

Moreover, the party has expressed unease at its ally, Sena (UBT) leader Uddhav Thackeray’s insistence on drawing his cousin, Raj Thackeray and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) into the MVA coalition. For the Congress, already wary of losing their North Indian voter base in Mumbai, any truck with a party associated with anti-migrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric is ideologically toxic. Raj Thackeray may add Marathi aggression to Uddhav’s ‘softer’ Hindutva, but he repels the very constituencies Congress hopes to keep. The Sena (UBT) argues that MNS could consolidate Marathi votes against the BJP. However, the Congress sees an alliance that would haemorrhage its minority and migrant support.

Small wonder then that tempers are rising. Sharad Pawar has attempted to play mediator, calling for all parties to remain ‘flexible,’ but his own party’s shrinking footprint reduces his capacity to enforce coalition discipline.

Coalitions in Indian politics have collapsed for less. The MVA was always a marriage of necessity, not of conviction. After 2023, it comprised of a Marathi regional party adjusting to a post-split identity, a national party seeking revival and a breakaway NCP faction trying to regain relevance. What bound them was a negative consensus to keep the BJP out.

For the Congress, going solo is a gamble that could either reassert its relevance or accelerate its marginalisation. For Uddhav Thackeray, the BMC is the last remaining bastion. Unless the MVA rediscovers why it came together in the first place, this may well be the election where Maharashtra quietly closes the chapter on this most unusual coalition.