Mumbai: Maharashtra legislature’s monsoon session will be held in Nagpur, the winter capital of the state and the most important city of Vidarbha region, the government announced on Wednesday in what was interpreted as a sign of an early general election next year.
Only twice before has the monsoon session been held in Nagpur, which normally hosts the winter session.
A committee of three senior ministers—parliamentary affairs minister Girish Bapat, senior Shiv Sena leader and industry minister minister Subhash Desai and finance minister Sudhir Mungantiwar —studied the demand to hold the monsoon session in Nagpur and made the recommendation.
The government has justified the decision on the grounds that it came from legislators across parties who are worried about their accommodation in Mumbai for the monsoon session on account of the MLA hostel being due for renovation.
But supporters of a separate Vidarbha state see the move as strong indication of the Maharashtra assembly elections being held by the end of 2018, followed by early general elections in 2019.
As per schedule, the general elections are due by April 2019 and Maharashtra assembly elections by October 2019. But the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would be keen to placate voters in Vidarbha before the polls.
Former Maharashtra advocate general Shreehari Aney, president of a political party called Vidarbha Rajya Aghadi (ViRA) that is dedicated to the statehood cause, saw “a larger political reason” behind this move.
“I think the monsoon session in Vidarbha is a precursor to likely early elections in late 2018. Much depends on what happens in the Karnataka elections but if the general elections are preponed, the monsoon session in Vidarbha is self-explanatory as it would turn out to be the last full session of this government in its current term before the elections. The BJP would be keen to make all the promises, commitments it wants to make before elections, in Vidarbha in order to electorally safeguard the region before the polls,” Aney said on the phone.
A state BJP functionary, however, ruled out early polls, saying the monsoon was aimed at prioritizing Vidarbha’s development. “There is no early election happening because (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi would not want to lose six months of his tenure which could be used in furthering the development agenda,” said the BJP functionary requesting anonymity.
Since October 2014 when the BJP emerged as the single largest party in Maharashtra elections and formed the government with ally Shiv Sena, its commitment to the Vidarbha statehood cause has undergone subtle but suggestive changes.
Aney said the BJP has changed the narrative “intelligently and slightly from promising a Vidarbha state if it came to power in 2014 to development first, statehood later after coming to power to statehood at an appropriate time now”.
“Vidarbha statehood was certainly an issue in the 2014 Maharashtra elections and all BJP leaders including Devendra Fadnavis offered statehood as an incentive to the voters. That is why the voters in Vidarbha believed the BJP and gave it 44 out of 62 assembly seats in the region. But the BJP is now aware that there is a swing back in their love affair with Vidarbha and by holding the monsoon session here it wants to make another bid to safeguard at least one voting bloc before polls,” Aney said.
Under the Nagpur Pact signed on 28 September 1953 when it was decided that a state of Maharashtra would be established comprising the Marathi-speaking regions in the erstwhile Bombay Province, Central Province, and the princely state of Hyderabad, a concession was made to Nagpur, which was the capital of the Central Province, that at least one session of the state legislature would be held there to take up Vidarbha’s issues.
At the time of reorganization of states on the lingual basis, Vidarbha, which was part of the Central Province that included much of today’s Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, nurtured a strong sentiment for statehood and the Nagpur Pact sought to address this sentiment by offering a time-bound development of the backward region for its inclusion in Maharashtra.