A tactic aimed at keeping sugarcane workers back in their native places for voting day in Maharashtra appears to be backfiring for the ruling Mahayuti.

With Maharashtra sugar mills getting licences to start their crushing operation only on Thursday, a day before the start of the season, many like Raju Gurade have already headed out to other states to pick up work. Taking his toli (team) of 24 people to harvest cane in neighbouring Karnataka earlier this week, Gurade, who belongs to Georai taluka of Beed district, said waiting any longer would have made them lose out on the harvesting window in Karnataka, and made even hiring chakras (tractor-trolleys) for travel hard.

What about voting on November 20? Gurade smiled: “We will come back… of course there are conditions to that.”

Sources said the delay in the issue of licences to sugar mills for start of the crushing operations was on account of the expectation by a high-power committee headed by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde that polls in Maharashtra would be held in the second week of November. Accordingly, it set November 15 as the date for the start of the crushing season, expecting the labourers to be done voting by then and free to move out.

But then came the Election Commission announcement fixing November 20 as polling day.

As part of an unorganised but well-oiled mechanism in Maharashtra, sugar mills arrange for harvesting and transportation of sugarcane from the fields to their plants. The labour for harvesting and transportation is arranged through muggadams or middlemen, who are paid an advance, with the labourers getting around Rs 460 per tonne of cane harvested. Per day, a toli (gang) of 10-12 labourers can harvest 15-20 tonnes, which is precious income that cannot be foregone.

One of the districts where the migration is set to have an impact on the election outcome is Marathwada’s Beed, the home district of BJP leader Pankaja Munde and her cousin and Agriculture Minister Dhananjay Munde of the NCP (Ajit Pawar). Beed alone sees annual migration of 5 lakh labourers – mainly from the Vanjari community – for harvesting work. This will affect the prospects of Dhananjay, who is contesting from the Beed Assembly seat, with Mundes belonging to the Vanjari community.

Marathwada has been the heart of the Maratha quota stir in the state for the past year, and even saw some violence between the community and OBC groups. Pankaja’s loss in the Lok Sabha elections to the NCP (SP)’s Bajrang Sonawane from Beed – a family turf for years – was attributed to the Maratha consolidation against the ruling Mahayuti, whom the community accuses of dragging its feet on the quota issue.

If the Maratha anger again plays out, Dhananjay will need the Vanjari votes even more to retain his seat, which he won in 2019 on the NCP (then united) ticket, defeating Pankaja.

Sonawane says the Mahayuti government will only have itself to blame if the sugarcane workers are not present on voting day. “It is the duty of the government to ensure they can vote. They should not be deprived of their constitutional rights,” he said.

In all, Maharashtra employs about 8-8.5 lakh labourers for sugar harvesting. Another four lakh travel out to Karnataka and Gujarat.

As per an estimate of the Maharashtra Sugarcane Cutters and Transport Association, more than 12 lakh sugarcane cutters from Marathwada, North Maharashtra and Vidarbha may miss voting as a result. Jeewan Rathod, the president of the association, has asked the government to make arrangements to ensure that the labourers can vote. “The Election Commission allows men in uniform to exercise their franchise using postal ballots. Similar mechanisms must be explored for the labourers also,” he said.

Rathod has also appealed to the Bombay High Court to direct the EC to make the arrangements, and to ask the state’s Sugar Commissioner to coordinate with the Maharashtra State Cooperative Sugar Factories Federation Limited, West Indian Sugar Mills Association, and all sugar mills to declare a holiday for workers on election day.

A BJP leader in Beed said all parties could try to get the labourers back for voting. “But that would involve spending on their transport, with no guarantee that they would actually come back for voting.”

Sugar mills in Maharashtra, on their part, have said that the labourers hired from other places in the state would be allowed to go home to vote.

However, the state’s sugar industry is also counting its losses, fearing that a paucity of labour could result in lower-than-capacity crushing plus transport of cane to mills in Karnataka. “The season will start on a rough note. We have to see how the problem is resolved,” a miller from Kolhapur said.

After the petition in the High Court, there was an informal move by the government to delay the start of the crushing season and push it back to November 25. However, this is not agreeable to the sugarcane growers, who outnumber the cutters multiple times over. A delay in crushing hits the yield as well as affects the next crop.