Testing an Ambedkarite Gamble

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 municipalities and gram panchayats. It is a partnership that looks modest on paper but is freighted with larger ambitions. The Congress sees in it a chance to reclaim the social coalition that once anchored its politics while the VBA sees an opportunity to convert its moral influence into institutional heft.

Maharashtra’s political terrain has been transformed over the past decade. The rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) reordered the state’s electorate, drawing in a swathe of OBCs, upper-lower-class voters and north-Indian migrants who found resonance in the party’s mix of Hindutva and welfare delivery. The BJP’s stable of powerful OBC leaders further eroded the Congress’ position in districts it once treated as pocket boroughs.

Changing Equations

Marathas, the state’s most politically influential community, drifted into the competing nets of the NCP, the Shiv Sena’s warring factions and a constellation of independents. Meanwhile Dalits, once considered a reliable Congress bloc, splintered across formations: Ramdas Athawale’s faction of the Republican Party of India, the AIMIM in urban enclaves, and most notably the VBA, which captured a generation of younger Ambedkarite voters disenchanted with both identity tokenism and traditional party structures.

The Congress-VBA alliance is thus more than a tactical handshake; it is a confession of weakness and a wager on revival. For Congress, the partnership is an attempt to arrest fragmentation among Dalit, Muslim and tribal voters, who together constitute a formidable share of the electorate in many semi-urban and rural townships. For the VBA, the tie-up provides access to Congress’ expansive booth-level networks and cadres which it lacks.

The alliance is being tested in places such as Nanded, a district with a substantial Scheduled Caste, Muslim and backward-class presence. The choice is deliberate. Local body elections, unlike assembly contests, are decided by minuscule swings: a few hundred votes can reshape a council; a well-coordinated caste bloc can dominate a ward. The Congress hopes that by presenting a united Dalit-Muslim front, it can blunt the advantage larger parties enjoy in multi-cornered fights.

Competing Loyalties

Today, Maharashtra’s political map has become a mosaic of competing loyalties. The BJP and the Eknath Shinde–led Shiv Sena, nominal coalition partners, have often tugged in different directions. The Uddhav Thackeray–led Shiv Sena (UBT) is locked in turf battles with both Congress and the NCP (Sharad Pawar) in pockets of Mumbai and Thane. Ajit Pawar’s faction of the NCP redraws its alliances by district, forcing each party to re-evaluate its calculations every few weeks. Local polls have become an arena where ‘friends turning foes’ is less an aberration than a method of political hygiene.

This flux offers the Congress-VBA combine a brief opening. Where contests devolve into triangles or quadrangles, even small consolidations of vote banks can tilt outcomes. Dalits and Muslims together form a sizeable share of voters in many of the municipalities headed to the polls. But in recent years their votes have scattered among VBA, AIMIM, RPI factions and local independents, often handing victory to the BJP or to entrenched regional satraps. A joint slate could, in theory, stanch this diffusion.

Yet the alliance carries risk. Local Congress units, especially in big cities, are notoriously territorial. Many prefer going solo rather than giving up wards to a smaller ally, fearing that any concession diminishes their standing among cadre. Reports already suggest resistance in Mumbai and other metropolitan clusters, where Congress leaders worry that sharing space with the VBA could weaken their own organisational morale.

A second challenge is more structural. Over the past decade, the BJP has built a formidable local machinery in Maharashtra: booth committees that function year-round, micro-targeting techniques honed through repeated campaigns, and OBC leaders who can blend identity politics with the promise of welfare schemes. Even with consolidated votes, the Congress-VBA combine must persuade voters that it has a credible programme for potholes, water supply, sanitation and the quotidian grind of municipal governance.

Even so, the alliance carries implications beyond the ward level. Should the experiment succeed, it could furnish Congress with a template to revive itself in other states where its traditional vote banks have frayed. In Maharashtra, it might become the nucleus of a broader coalition ahead of the next assembly elections, particularly if voters begin to see the Congress as capable not merely of providing ideological ballast but of winning elections again.

For many Dalit and Muslim voters, the Congress still remains the default national alternative, but their support has today become tempered. They see in Congress an ideological shelter but doubt its capacity for electoral combat. The alliance with the VBA is meant to counter precisely that scepticism: to signal that Congress is willing to reinvent its social coalition and fight on the ground, ward by ward, rather than rely on nostalgia or national-level rhetoric. Whether this gamble pays off will become clear only when the ballots are tallied. If the alliance manages to translate social logic into electoral gains, it could mark the beginning of a deeper reordering of Maharashtra’s politics. If it fails, the fragmentation of the anti-BJP vote will persist, strengthening the hand of the BJP and the state’s regional warlords.

For now, though, the Congress has stepped back into the caste matrix it once dominated, hoping that an Ambedkarite partnership might help stitch together a constituency that drifted apart. Maharashtra’s local polls rarely offer ideological theatre. This time, however, they may reveal whether a fraying coalition can be knit back together from the smallest tier of democracy upwards.

 (The writer is a political observer. Views personal.)