The exit of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has dealt a body blow to the INDIA bloc in the run-up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
In an effort to soften the blow, the Maha Vikas Aghadi is making all efforts in Maharashtra to give a tough fight to the BJP-led ‘Mahayuti’. In the 2019 election, Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi had dented the Congress’s prospects by splitting up Dalit and Muslim community votes as it was in alliance with AIMIM.
Learning a lesson, the Shiv Sena and NCP have agreed to take along Prakash Ambedkar-led Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi this time. However, Ambedkar believes his party is not part of MVA.
In an exclusive interview with News18, Ambedkar said his party had received an invitation for the MVA seat-sharing meeting but was still waiting for official approval from the Congress high command for their inclusion in the alliance.
“We got a formal invitation, so we attended the meeting. Shiv Sena has agreed to our inclusion, and Sharad Pawar-led NCP has changed its stand and given its nod for our inclusion in the alliance. But Congress, whose high command sits in Delhi, has not given any approval yet. Yes, we have got a letter from the state president but when we met the Maharashtra Congress in-charge, he told me that Balasaheb Thorat and Ashok Chavan are two leaders who will hold talks with Vanchit on behalf of the Congress. We haven’t got any letter from them about approving or giving the nod for our inclusion so how can we say that we are part of MVA?” asked Ambedkar.
He added: “When Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar had gone to meet Kharge for Vanchit’s inclusion in MVA, he told them there is a division in the state leadership of Congress as one section is in favour of Vanchit but the other is against it… So the trio decided that Shiv Sena UBT should speak to us. This information we received officially from Shiv Sena UBT. Hence, we are still waiting for confirmation from central leadership of Congress.”
Ambedkar said he had asked MVA for clarity on certain issues before agreeing to become a part of the alliance.
“We want them to clear their stand on issues like OBCs as we don’t want anyone else in our reservation. We want clarity on Jarange Patil, Maratha reservation and Minimum Support Price for the produce of farmers. We have convinced them to clear their stand on these issues and then we will talk about the alliance. Prime Minister Narendra Modi can’t be the only point to fight an election together. We have given them many other points which concern Maharashtra at large.”
Insisting that his outfit has sizeable voters in each constituency, Ambedkar said: “We have approximately 2.5 lakh voters in all constituencies. We have not added Muslims to this as they have their apprehension about Maha Vikas Aghadi. Muslims feel that PM Modi is a ringmaster and every political party is within his ring. Thus, he can turn around anything. The Muslim community is not trusting anybody this time. They are not looking for any seat this time. They just have one demand that RSS-BJP government should not come back to power.”
Responding to how many and which seats Vanchit was looking to contest, Ambedkar replied, “This time, we have sizeable voters and we believe that we should galvanise them. If this alliance doesn’t happen, we are ready to contest all 48 seats of Lok Sabha in the state. When we have 2.5 lakh voters in each constituency, we don’t want to identify any particular seat.”
Ambedkar, while expressing sympathy with ally Uddhav Thackeray about his party being split into two, said the real issues plaguing the state were about Marathas and OBCs.
He also blamed PM Modi for creating friction in the INDIA bloc. “The frictions played their part and the alliance split. So there is no INDIA bloc now. Akhilesh Yadav, Mamata Banerjee, and AAP are stubborn about not making any compromise on Lok Sabha seats. We all saw that Nitish Kumar has walked out of the bloc.”
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