Any plan by the BJP to tweak Maharashtra's socio-cultural agenda, the Maharashtra dharma, which transcends creed and caste, will trigger tension in the Mahayuti alliance and shatter the state's inclusive character. For a start, the BJP's central leadership needs to give up scanning Maharashtra through its North-centric lens.
Deeply ingrained in the state's cultural consciousness, the hoary Maharashtra dharma has been deepened by medieval saint-poets; the multiple sampradays - for instance, the Nath and the Varkari sect which preached harmony and compassion, the fiercely fought Maratha-Mughal wars, and the 20th-century social crusades which culminated in the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti's prolonged struggle in the 1950s to create a separate linguistic state for Marathi, this with Mumbai as its capital. The Samiti leaders were miffed with Jawaharlal Nehru for his proposal to turn Bombay (as the city was then known) into a Union territory. The confrontation assumed the proportions of an epic Maratha-Mughal war. History has its own way of getting into the hair of contemporary politics.
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