Narendra Modi

Maharashtra has reversed the political optics after the Lok Sabha election outcome and dispelled any doubts about who remains the most dominant figure in Indian politics. Calling it a comeback is a misnomer because Narendra Modi had not gone anywhere; he had returned to office for a third time in the summer; and the Haryana win had also already boosted the morale of the party. But a comeback still perhaps captures the spirit of what has just happened, for Modi’s political capital has been replenished substantially after the assembly election results in Maharashtra, India’s most critical state in terms of economic weight and second only to Uttar Pradesh in terms of political weight. A win would have been enough but the scale of the win leaves Modi with a really strong hand.

This replenished political capital reinforces Modi’s control over the government and the party. It silences those who may have entertained notions of challenging Modi’s political choices discreetly or publicly in the party or the wider Sangh Parivar. It gives the PM political space for at least another year, till the elections in Bihar at the end of 2025, to focus on implementing his agenda without major electoral encumbrances (only Delhi goes to polls till then). It ensures BJP’s influence over corporate India in Mumbai remains intact. And it leaves Modi’s rivals, particularly the Congress, floundering yet again. Winning Jharkhand would have been an icing on the cake for the party and it will regret not getting Ranchi, but Maharashtra is the real cake. And it is now for Modi to shape the future of the state and give it the political stability and governance direction it has lacked for five years.

Devendra Fadnavis

Few leaders have gone through political swings of the kind that Devendra Fadnavis has experienced in the past decade. A rising star from Nagpur, plucked and made chief minister largely because the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh liked him and the BJP national leadership wanted to pick a younger leader in 2014, Fadnavis honed his political and administrative skills, only to become a victim of the BJP-Shiv Sena breakup in 2019 over who would be CM.

After failed political experiments, a stint in opposition, an active role in splitting two regional parties, a return to power, a demotion to deputy chief ministership (ostensibly for the party but probably because others wanted to pull him down a notch or two), and a setback in the Lok Sabha elections, Fadnavis is back — and how. The nature and scale of the Maharashtra win places Fadnavis again in the top rung of state leaders in BJP, along with Yogi Adityanath and Himanta Biswa Sarma. It sets him up for leadership in Maharashtra or a plum political position at the Centre. His strong Sangh roots, access to capital due to continued influence over power in Mumbai, his stint in government and now his proven ability to survive politically adverse times while remaining a disciplined soldier will all add up in his favour when the race for national leadership in the BJP begins at some point in the next decade.

Sharad Pawar

When Sharad Pawar first entered the Maharashtra assembly, Indira Gandhi had just become prime minister, and the Opposition was attempting its first broad anti-Congress coalition under Ram Manohar Lohia. It was 1967. It is quite incredible that Pawar, now 83, remains such a central actor in the state’s politics 57 years later. But while his longevity and shrewdness have often been admired, what is likely to have been the final election in which he would play such a central role has ended up creating a crisis for Pawar, his family and his party.

The loss and the scale of the loss positions Ajit Pawar — not Supriya Sule — as the true successor of the Sharad Pawar legacy, at least as far as the state’s politics is concerned even if Sule has a higher profile in Delhi. It leaves the father and daughter with the choice of either merging with the Congress, a prospect that Pawar has alluded to, or attempting to rebuild the party, a task that Sule will have to commit to undertake given the older Pawar’s age, or attempting a rapprochement with the nephew, an exercise that will seal Ajit Pawar’s leadership status. Sharad Pawar, the boy from Baramati who became the elder statesman of Indian politics, has some hard decisions ahead. And he doesn’t have time on his side.

Uddhav Thackeray

Uddhav Thackeray had a choice in 2019. He could have let Devendra Fadnavis be chief minister, reconciled to the fact that the terms of the alliance that his father had stitched and nourished with Pramod Mahajan decades earlier had changed and the BJP was now the senior partner, and continued to exercise power from Matoshree while grooming his son Aditya to both lead the party in government in a ministerial capacity and wait to see politics turn. Instead, Thackeray decided that he would claim what he said the BJP had promised him, the chief ministership. In the process, he broke the saffron alliance, went with ideological adversaries, formed the government (and became the CM), witnessed his party splitting, and then was left in the Opposition. This election was a referendum on his 2019 decision.

And the people have spoken. Whether it was because Eknath Shinde’s Sena was more rooted, or had the advantage of incumbency, or was seen as the true ideological inheritor of Balasaheb’s legacy, or the Thackeray Sena’s workers didn’t work for the alliance, or whether the makeover into a moderate urbane party left the party disconnected from its roots, the fact is that Uddhav and Aditya Thackeray have presided over a humiliating rout. This will have implications for sustaining their party structure, retaining workers, fighting the BJP, or even being a robust opposition. The father-son duo’s toughest political test comes ahead.

Eknath Shinde

Those who did not follow the intricacies of Maharashtra’s politics were probably not even aware of Eknath Shinde till he decided to split from Uddhav Thackeray, ally with the BJP and lead the Maharashtra government in 2022. The Lok Sabha results then bolstered those who believed that Shinde had made a mistake; that he was a fleeting political phenomenon at best; and that Sena’s workers would never leave the Thackerays. And yet, in proof that politics is not linear and predetermined and making lazy assumptions about political leaders isn’t always smart, Eknath Shinde had proven his sceptics wrong in the most effective way possible — with an election win that makes his Sena the real inheritor of the Sena legacy in Maharashtra, at least for now.

Shinde’s party actually did relatively well in the Lok Sabha election too, with a higher strike rate than any other allies in Mahayuti. He pushed through welfare schemes, including the cash transfer for women that many see as the gamechanger in this election. An old party organiser from Balasaheb’s days, Shinde had a much stronger grasp on the Sena’s local networks than many assumed. And the BJP smartly allowed him to continue being the face of the alliance to win back as much of the Sena vote as possible. What comes next isn’t clear and will hinge on the power negotiations within the alliance on who becomes CM, but Shinde is now a strong regional leader in his own right.

Ajit Pawar

Under the guidance of his uncle Sharad Pawar, Ajit Pawar built the Nationalist Congress Party in Maharashtra. He became the face of the good and the bad of the party — the good in terms of NCP’s strong organisational network in western Maharashtra and its absolute loyalty among supporters who had seen the tangible economic good that the Pawars had done for the region; the bad in terms of the perceived, alleged and real machine of corruption and patronage that the NCP presided over. And that is why when Ajit Pawar shifted and allied with the BJP, Sharad Pawar’s NCP had a clear aim — prevent the nephew from taking away the good (the sangathan), and blame him for the bad (the corruption).

It didn’t work. Ajit Pawar kept the good and the bad didn’t affect him as it had during the Lok Sabha elections when elements within the larger Sangh Parivar, unhappy with the BJP allying with someone who represented the kind of politics the Sangh claimed to fight, didn’t turn up to work for the Mahayuti. But differences within the Sangh have been patched up, and it is likely that the larger objective of retaining power in the home state of the Sangh in its centenary year prevailed. This gave Pawar the external enabling environment he needed to focus on the internal — and here the fact that he had a clear edge over Supriya Sule in terms of experience and grasp over state politics and its networks helped. The win allows Ajit Pawar to position himself as the inheritor of the Pawar legacy and continue remaining in power while ensuring that the corruption cases against him continue to remain dormant.

Hemant Soren

Voters may not like corruption. But voters also don’t like it when they feel that there is a selectiveness with which a leader has been targeted for corruption. And if the leader happens to be from a marginalised social group that has often been a victim of the State and is familiar with the distortions in how the rule of law is applied, then there is an even stronger backlash. This has happened repeatedly in Indian electoral history. Hemant Soren’s remarkable political comeback will go down as a part of this history — as a political leader who was seen to be politically persecuted coming back to power through the political route of a democratic mandate to withstand the legal obstacles placed in his way.

But Soren’s win is not just a reflection of his political resilience; it is also a reminder that in politics, just engineering splits, parachuting in to engineer communal divisions, and seeking to impose one’s ideology in a community that has its own history and struggles and issues doesn’t always work. This is what the BJP was doing with tribals. And this is what Soren withstood, thanks to his father’s legacy among tribal voters, his wife’s courage in standing up when he was arrested, his party’s organisational roots, and his allies. The Jharkhand win is a vindication of the Soren legacy and gives Hemant an opportunity to translate popular goodwill and newly acquired political strength into focused governance.

Rahul Gandhi

Perhaps no leader has frittered away political openings at such frequency as Rahul Gandhi. It was only this summer when a better-than-expected performance in the Lok Sabha reinforced Congress’s position as the other pole in Indian politics, allowed Gandhi to become the leader of the opposition, made his admirers feel vindicated and forced even his critics to offer their grudging admiration. This was all based on the Congress winning 99 seats, its third worst performance in history, but just because the bar had fallen so low the last two times, the defeat felt like a victory. Yet, within six months, Gandhi has presided over a return to business as usual.

If, in Haryana, factional trouble within the Congress and feuds between its caste leaders led to a debacle, in Maharashtra, there was trouble within the alliance. To be sure, the Congress was just one of the three pillars of the MVA. But as a party that governed Maharashtra from 1999 to 2014, a straight 15 years not so long back, and now has less than one-tenth of the seats in the assembly, the national leadership cannot escape responsibility. Gandhi should have been managing the friction within the alliance, robustly countering the government’s new welfare push, and strengthening organisation on the ground. If the Congress can’t even leverage the political opportunity in India’s richest state which had just delivered a stern rebuke to the BJP just six months ago, the impression that Gandhi is out of touch, or not serious, or not in control, or not consistent, is bound to resurface. It will also diminish his ability to unite the opposition in Parliament. And it weakens his standing in making the case against the government. Jharkhand offers solace. But the task of rebuilding the Congress just got harder.