Mumbai, June 7: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has launched a critique of the November 2024 Maharashtra assembly elections, accusing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of orchestrating a “match-fixing” operation to engineer a victory. The Mahayuti alliance comprising the BJP, the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena, and the Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) secured 235 of the 288 assembly seats. The BJP alone accounted for 132 of these, its best performance in the state’s history.Rahul Gandhi, in an op-ed for The Indian Express, claimed that the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) employed a five-step model to subvert the democratic process in the state.
In the 2024 elections, while the BJP registered a landslide victory, in contrast, the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) formed by the Congress, the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena (UBT), and Sharad Pawar’s NCP (SP) was reduced to a mere 50 seats. For Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar, who had lost control of their respective parties and symbols in the preceding months, the result was a massive blow.