Former Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis on Thursday said “things could have been better, faster” if the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was in power without the Shiv Sena in alliance in the State from 2014-2019, particularly when it came to “touch decisions”.

Mr. Fadnavis was speaking to Congress leader and former Union minister Milind Deora during the online launch of the book India Tomorrow: Conversations with the Next Generation of Political Leaders by Professor Pradeep Chhibber and Harsh Shah organised by the Centre for Policy Research and the Trivedi Centre for Political Data at Ashoka University.

Mr. Deora asked the BJP leader if he was interested in moving to national politics, to which he replied that “eventually, that would interest me”. When asked by Mr. Deora whether the friction between the then coalition partners did not make him want to leave State politics for the national stage, Mr. Fadnavis said: “For those five years, although it was quite smooth, it was quite turbulent as well. Many times, it used to feel like ‘why is this happening?’”

He said while the Shiv Sena was a partner in the government, it would try to “put itself in the space of the Opposition” when the government took certain decisions.

“After some time, you come to terms with it. I said ‘okay, I will go on doing what I want’. Mostly, I managed my Cabinet in such a way that all my decisions were unanimous. I had to work more. I had to do some backdoor things, meetings, conversations. Had it been a single party government, things would have been better, faster,” he said.

He termed the Shiv Sena-Nationalist Congress Party-Congress coalition in Maharashtra currently “unnatural”, but added that coalition politics in States would remain a factor for the next 10-20 years.

During the discussion on coalitions, Mr. Deora said he had never thought the Congress and Shiv Sena would come together in alliance. Terming such coalitions a “compulsion of politics”, he said these kinds of alliances would be formed as long as the BJP was strong.

Mr. Deora raised concerns over the shrinking of “middle ground” in politics, recounting how he and MPs from Mumbai across party lines met then-prime minister Manmohan Singh to discuss the Navi Mumbai airport project in 2005.

Mr. Fadnavis, too, said there was worrying trend of “political untouchablity” that had crept into politics in the past 10-20 years. He cited former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee saying that political opponents should not become political enemies. He said the situation in Maharashtra was “still good”, but in “some southern states, some northern states, they [political opponents] are enemies”. He said there was a need for all politicians to introspect and address the issue.