One Dimensional Politics

Forget development, ideology and corruption, Maharashtra’s election is all about dynastic politics, money power and a record number of rebel and independent contestants

HERBERT Marcuse, one of the greatest German-born American political philosopher of the 20th century, in his most important book One-Dimensional Man argues that the aspiration of the poor to become rich and the aspiration of the rich to become richer, eventually blurs the line of the class divide between the rich and the poor and also between the oppressor and the oppressed. In more than one way, this analogy can be applied to the political class of India in general, and Maharashtra in particular.

Those who are not in power want to be there and those who are already there want to be there forever!

To achieve this, they are ready to give up their ideologies; rather, most of them have already given up. In the 2024 Maharashtra Assembly elections, it’s completely de-ideologised politics at play. There are six main parties in the fray in two coalitions—the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Shiv Sena (Shinde) and the Nationalist Congress Party (Ajit Pawar) as Mahayuti, and the Indian National Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar) and the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Thackeray) as Maha Vikas Aghadi—and there are six smaller parties allied with these two coalitions. There are a few more non-aligned parties like the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) and the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi and others. There are also rebels or ‘vote cutters’ from all parties; there are ‘proxy candidates’ and finally, independents, whose number has skyrocketed in this election like never before.

They all have become mirror images of each other. There are no major differentiators.