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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.

Igniting India’s Orange Economy

The Union Budget places culture and creativity at the centre of the country’s next growth story.

India is attempting something unusual for an emerging economy by treating imagination as infrastructure. In the Union Budget for 2026–27, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman put a conspicuous emphasis on what is now fashionably called the ‘Orange Economy’ - a grab-bag of industries built on creativity, intellectual property and digital distribution. The ambition is explicit. By 2030 the sector is expected to employ 2 million professionals, generating jobs while projecting India as a global creative hub rather than merely a back office of the world.


Creative Surge

The Orange Economy covers activities where ideas are the raw material and intellectual property the final product. Film, music, design, fashion, advertising, architecture, software, gaming, animation, publishing and digital media all fall under its capacious umbrella. Digital platforms like YouTube, Instagram Reels and streaming services have amplified its reach, allowing culture to travel faster than cargo. In India, initiatives such as the WAVES summit have sought to turn this diffuse energy into a coherent economic strategy, arguing that art and ideas are not decorative add-ons but engines of growth.


Globally, the case is persuasive. Creative industries generate about $2 trillion a year and employ roughly 50 million people, around 3.1 percent of the world’s workforce, according to UN estimates. By 2030 their share of global employment could rise to 10 percent. The United States, Britain and China dominate the field, exporting films, music, games and intellectual property at scale. America alone commands more than 20 percent of the market, thanks to Hollywood and technology platforms. India has no neat global ranking, but it is widely seen as a fast climber, buoyed by its media, entertainment, animation, gaming, visual-effects and digital-content industries.


At home, the numbers are already sizeable. India’s media and entertainment sector is valued at about Rs. 2.5 lakh crore ($29.4 billion), while live entertainment exceeds Rs. 10,000 crore. Together with gaming, digital content and cultural industries, the Orange Economy accounts for roughly 8 percent of employment and has delivered export growth of around 20 percent, with a target of $50 billion by 2029. Its scope is sprawling, from AVGC and e-sports to fashion, publishing, cultural tourism and heritage industries.


Special Focus

Sitharaman’s budgetary pitch was to institutionalise this sprawl. She announced a special focus on strengthening the creative economy, anchored in education and infrastructure. Mumbai’s Indian Institute of Creative Technologies is to be supported in setting up AVGC content-creator laboratories in 15,000 secondary schools and 500 colleges. Funding includes Rs. 1.4 lakh crore for digital creators and creative ecosystems, alongside Rs. 250 crore for these labs, designed to funnel students into a national skills drive. Supporters argue that this will formalise what has until now been an informal, hustle-driven sector, accelerating innovation while giving young Indians a global stage.


The political framing has been set from the top. At the WAVES Summit in Mumbai in 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi cast the World Audio Visual and Entertainment Summit as a declaration of creative intent. With representatives from 30 countries and creators from more than 100, the event was meant to showcase India’s artistic reach and technological ambition. Modi described WAVES as a confluence of global talent and pitched India as a natural home for creative start-ups, digital innovation, film and entertainment. His slogan - “create in India, create for the world” - was an invitation to collaborate as much as a claim to leadership.


Indian content already circulates in over 100 countries, carried by animation, music, gaming and streaming platforms. Modi’s larger hope is that WAVES becomes less an annual event than a permanent ecosystem, exporting twenty-first-century stories rooted in Indian culture but shaped by global technology.


The spillovers are tangible. The creative economy turbocharges tourism through culture- and heritage-led experiences. Revamping 15 historic sites with digital storytelling, interactive displays and modern infrastructure has drawn visitors and lifted local economies, from hotels to handicrafts. Live entertainment, music festivals and arts events have multiplied these effects, as noted in the Economic Survey for 2025–26. Cities, meanwhile, are discovering ‘concert economies,’ gaming hubs, design studios and AVGC labs, which generate cultural venues, digital infrastructure and start-ups. E-sports, streaming content and creative spaces now underpin urban services, accounting for about 8 percent of jobs and 20 percent of services exports. New institutions, such as the National Institute of Design (NID) in eastern India, are meant to deepen the skills pipeline.


None of this guarantees global dominance. Creative industries are fickle and tastes change quickly and intellectual-property protection remains uneven. But India’s strategic pivot is clear. If executed with care, India’s wager on creativity could yield dividends far beyond balance sheets. Unlike many growth strategies, the Orange Economy draws strength from assets the country already possesses in abundance including youthful talent, cultural depth and digital reach. It allows India to compete not by undercutting wages, but by shaping tastes.


By turning imagination into an industry, whether through Indian films dominating overseas streaming charts, indigenous games finding global audiences, or cultural festivals doubling as tourism magnets, India is positioning itself not merely as a producer for the world, but as one of its principal narrators.

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