The BJP’s landslide victory in Maharashtra has illustrated its ability to course-correct quickly — coming as it does just over five months after the Lok Sabha elections in which its tally dipped — and pull out all stops to retain power, countering the dissatisfaction any government faces.

The arithmetic is also what many in the party hoped for, more of a politically stable government instead of one pushed and pulled by partners. Given the numbers the Assembly elections have thrown up — the BJP has registered the highest strike rate — it will hardly be dependent on its allies Shiv Sena, led by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, and the Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) even though it may try and take them along. The BJP may try and get to its side the Independents who won as well as the winners from among the candidates it parked in the Shiv Sena and the NCP. It is possible that in time some in the considerably weakened NCP (SP) of Sharad Pawar and the Sena (UBT) of Uddhav Thackeray also look at greener pastures and move to the ruling side.

The overall numbers do not give elbow room to Shinde to exercise an option other than staying with the Mahayuti if he is not made CM. The entire MVA has ended with a number of seats 11 short than the Sena tally. That Shinde and Ajit Pawar have emerged as the “asli (real)” Sena and NCP has ramifications for Thackeray and 84-year-old Pawar who hinted during the campaign that this would be his last election. But then what will happen to the emaciated group he heads?  Will Pawar now exercise the option of merging his party in the Congress, a possibility he spoke about during the Lok Sabha elections?

The Ladki Bahin Yojana, empowering women by giving them cash in hand, proved to be a game-changer for the Mahayuti, enabling it to turn around in just over five months. The scheme worked its magic just like the Ladli Behna scheme, from which it was inspired, did in Madhya Pradesh last year.

Maharashtra has thrown up a template for winning elections that other parties will now find difficult to ignore or undo. Even as such schemes empower women, who have emerged as a powerful vote bank, it has implications for the country’s political economy and fiscal health. Maharashtra is already reeling under a debt burden and having promised to increase the monthly payout from Rs 1,500 to Rs 2,100 if it returns to power, the new government will have to spend Rs 63,000 crore annually to cover the 2.5 crore women it intends to reach out to under the Ladki Bahin scheme.

The efficiency with which money was put in the hands of a large number of women in the past four months — while travelling across Marathwada, I did not meet a single woman in villages or political rallies who had not received money — showed what the government can do when it has the will to deliver. But even before the results were out, worried officials in the Mantralaya in Mumbai who had worked round the clock to operationalise the scheme saw it leading to a slowing down of existing and future projects because of the financial crunch that is bound to come. This is going to be one of the major challenges before the new government.

Next up for the Mahayuti is the decision on who the CM will be: Shinde, Devendra Fadnavis, or someone else from the BJP, which may want one of its own to run the show and get on with governance without much interference from its junior allies.

The BJP’s runaway victory raises another question. Was there a sympathy factor at play for Fadnavis that fuelled support for the BJP? When the Mahayuti came to power in 2023 after toppling the MVA government, the BJP high command suddenly downgraded him from a CM frontrunner to one of the two Deputy CMs under Shinde. Fadnavis was not even allowed to remain outside the government as he wanted to do. The BJP’s victory will thus be vindication of his honour.

The sympathy factor for Pawar and Thackeray was believed to have been at play during the Lok Sabha elections when the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) won 30 of the 48 Lok Sabha seats. But then, in politics, sympathy may not manifest itself more than once.

There were undoubtedly other reasons for the BJP’s victory, major among them being the RSS’s proactive role unlike the Lok Sabha polls when it held itself back. For the Nagpur-headquartered Sangh, the Maharashtra election was something of a prestige issue. The BJP also swept Vidarbha, winning 40 of the 62 seats. The region was once considered a Congress stronghold and the place where the BJP was involved in the most direct contests with the Congress.

The OBCs consolidated behind the BJP more than the Marathas, who had been pushing to be given quota under the OBC category. Dalits too appear not to have stood with the MVA as much as they did during the Lok Sabha elections, perhaps because they felt that the “Save the Constitution” pitch that the Congress had raised back then was not really a factor in a state election.

The Maharashtra outcome points to the evolution in the BJP’s electioneering beyond Prime Minister Narendra Modi throwing his weight behind its campaigns. As in Haryana, so also in Maharashtra, Modi addressed only a few rallies compared to the blitz he used to mount in state battles earlier. He was not over-exposed (neither, for that matter, did Rahul Gandhi play a proactive role). The battle was less about the national leadership of parties and more about the state leaders, institutional mechanisms, and an organisational machinery, used to winning election after election, that the BJP under Modi and Shah has put into place.

Jharkhand has brought some cheer to the INDIA bloc that has retained the state with a convincing majority, also thanks to the sympathy factor for Hemant Soren who was put in jail in an alleged money laundering case. The alliance retained the support of tribals and put in place appealing welfare schemes, prominent among them the Maiya Samman Yojana for women from underprivileged communities. There was a huge reaction to the Assam-type model sought to be imposed (by Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma) against “infiltrators” from Bangladesh when Jharkhand does not even share a border with the neighbouring country. The win marks the rise of a new tribal star in Soren who has managed a victory that even his father and JMM co-founder Shibu Soren did not clock.

A little on Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s win from Wayanad, the seat that her brother and the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi vacated. Her massive win by 4.1 lakh votes will give the heart to an otherwise demoralised Congress. The BJP will now have to contend with the brother-sister duo’s onslaught in the Lok Sabha, something that may lend momentum to the Opposition’s efforts to hold the government to account.

(Neerja Chowdhury, Contributing Editor, The Indian Express, has covered the last 11 Lok Sabha elections. She is the author of How Prime Ministers Decide)