Portfolio distribution has always been bone of contention in Maha

The stability of the government in Maharashtra is taken for granted, but nobody should be surprised if we see some fireworks

- Rohit Chandavarkar

Even as the BJP established a full majority in Maharashtra's assembly this week and got the highest number of seats in the assembly in the recent elections, the swearing-in of ministers and the process of establishing the full government has not happened yet in the state. Speculation is on about why and how this delay is happening, and it's very obvious that it is Shiv Sena leader Eknath Shinde whose insistence on certain portfolios has created a hurdle in the path of the BJP.

Portfolio distribution has always been a problem between alliance partners in Maharashtra. Historically speaking, the Congress and Sharad Pawar's NCP always fought over this issue, and the same happened when the BJP and Uddhav Thackeray's Shiv Sena were in power between 2014 and 2019.

Traditionally, Maharashtra always had a single-party rule with the Congress party always having a clear majority in the house of 288. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Congress had over 150 seats in the assembly, but for the first time in the 1995 election, as the saffron alliance Shiv Sena and BJP won the assembly polls, the state saw the emergence of coalition politics. In 1995, apart from the Shiv Sena and BJP, the independents won seats in large numbers, and many of them had to be accommodated in the cabinet led by Shiv Sena leader Manohar Joshi as the Chief Minister.

It was for the first time that two large parties had to share power almost equally and had to share portfolios. A formula to achieve some balance was reached, and BJP leader Gopinath Munde kept the Home and Energy portfolios.