Next MAHA mission for Devendra Fadnavis: Get extra MLA votes in presidential election

Mumbai: Devendra Fadnavis, the designated Maharashtra boss for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has upped the ante against the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi government to compel a political face-off and expose the true electoral strength of individual political formations within the state.

With President Ram Nath Kovind set to retire on July 25, 776 MPs and 4,120 MLAs across the country cast their votes to elect the next president.

Traditionally, presidential candidates seek a nomination from a political party before the election.

Now, the BJP has entrusted Fadnavis with engineering defections and cross-voting during the Presidential polls— which will see the 288 members of Maharashtra’s state legislative assembly (MLAs)—to flex its growing political muscle and demonstrate its higher than elected (105 MLAs in 2019 state assembly polls) strength in the state legislature.

The controversy surrounding the MP and MLA couple Navneet and Ravi Rana may have begun this process, with the two independent candidates likely to increase the BJP tally of MPs (nationally) and MLAs (in Maharashtra) by one each.

Confirming this, a BJP leader told First India, “It has been 2.5 years since the MVA government came to power in Maharashtra. And while the government claims the support of 170-plus MLAs, it has not held a single full-fledged election anywhere in the state. Apart from by-elections in Pandharpur and Kolhapur (bagged by the BJP and Congress, respectively), polls in five municipalities have been deferred since 2020 and in 18 municipalities, since the beginning of this year.”

Political temperatures are only set to rise in the coming days, even as the BJP is clear it wants to return to power in Maharashtra.