By Mujib Mashal

MUMBAI — The lawmakers had finished a routine assembly vote and were scattering into the Mumbai night.

Nitin Deshmukh, who represented a district 350 miles away, planned to take an overnight train. But first came an invitation to have dinner in the suburbs with a senior official from their party in the Indian state of Maharashtra. They would share a car ride, and Deshmukh could catch the train from there.

It was all a ruse.

As the car approached its destination, it kept speeding along and eventually joined a caravan of other vehicles. That, Deshmukh said, is when he realized he was being kidnapped. The car was heading across state lines, where he would be held in a hotel behind locked gates and later restrained and drugged after trying to flee.

Deshmukh had become a pawn in what is known as “resort politics”, a long-standing practice unique to India’s rough-and-tumble democracy.

The senior party official in the car with Deshmukh that night in June 2022 had secretly recruited a group of governing-party lawmakers to try to bring down the state government in Maharashtra. To ensure that they would stick to the plan, the lawmakers were moved to other states and isolated in luxury resorts.

Deshmukh and at least two other Maharashtra lawmakers, according to their own accounts, were taken against their will. The leaders of the insurrection wanted to make certain that their breakaway faction had a sufficient number of lawmakers to deprive the government of a majority and force it to collapse.

The hidden hand behind the manoeuvring, according to several lawmakers with knowledge of the events, was the party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In a series of closely contested states, his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), after failing to win power through elections, has gained effective control through similar episodes in which lawmakers were sent to resort hotels until their government fell.

In Maharashtra, several lawmakers said, some of the defectors had been paid to switch loyalties. Other lawmakers who sided with the BJP had publicly spoken beforehand of coming under withering pressure from investigating agencies controlled by Modi’s party.

The takeover of state governments is an extreme example of the no-holds-barred quest for total power by the BJP under Modi. As the country’s most dominant leader in a generation, he is working to entrench a new vision of India, one where the BJP and its Hindu-nationalist ideology reign supreme for decades to come. Deep footholds at the state level are crucial to his mission.

In Maharashtra, the prize for the BJP was as big as any in India: a state of 130 million people that is the country’s financial and entertainment powerhouse.

The machinations caused two of Maharashtra’s important parties to each split in two, pitting family members against one another, and scrambled the state’s political landscape, leaving an opening for a BJP-led coalition to take control. Residents have a favoured term for this confusing new state of affairs: kichdi, a mush of a dish in which the rice can’t be told apart from the lentils.

On Saturday (23), early results of the state’s first election since the breakaway insurrection appeared to reinforce the BJP’s anything-goes approach. A coalition led by the party was on track to win a strong majority to form the new government. Analysts said that two years in charge of government agencies and the state’s rich coffers, in which it expanded welfare programs and infrastructure projects, had put the coalition in such a dominant position in the election that it blew away its opposition.

“Don’t ask about ideology in Maharashtra; the entire politics of the state has changed,” Ajit Pawar, one of the politicians the BJP brought to its side by pressing him to split from his family, acknowledged to an interviewer before the state election. “Everyone wants power here. Ideology has been side-lined for power.”

Once power became everything, Deshmukh found himself trapped.

By Any Means

Resort politics is such a feared practice that mere rumours can send rival parties running to protect themselves.

In the southern state of Karnataka, home to the cash-rich tech hub of Bengaluru, Modi’s party brought down the government in 2019 by getting a dozen governing-party lawmakers to flee to a hotel in Mumbai, then controlled by the BJP. The defectors remained there until their party leader resigned and the government fell.

In Madhya Pradesh, in central India, the BJP coaxed an opposing senior political leader into resigning from the government in 2020. He brought with him about 20 lawmakers, many of whom decamped to a resort in Bengaluru, a city run by the BJP. Madhya Pradesh is now a BJP fortress.

The practice of resort politics goes back decades, to the time when the Congress party, run by the Nehru-Gandhi family, started losing its long dominance of Indian politics and an era of coalition politics began. Often, it was used not to bring down a government but to keep one intact.

More recently, on at least two occasions, whispers that the BJP was on a poaching hunt led other parties to lock up their own lawmakers in resorts for days, until the threat had dissipated.

The BJP uses its deep pockets to win allies and keep them on board. Equally important is the party’s control over feared national investigating agencies, determining who remains in politics, who profits from its vast riches and who winds up side-lined in a jail cell.

In states like Jharkhand and the capital region, Delhi, where the BJP’s attempts to break smaller parties have not worked, elected leaders have ended up in jail, paralyzing local governance.

Suhas Palshikar, a veteran political scientist based in Pune, said the BJP’s orchestrated fragmentation of politics in Maharashtra fit a pattern in its push for hegemonic control.

“They want to establish state-level governments by whatever means,” he said, “because they know that their overall social and political dominance can be sustained only if they have control over the state governments.”

Desperate to Escape 

The car ride that delivered Deshmukh into a weeklong ordeal landed him first at a resort in Gujarat, Modi’s home state, where the prime minister has close to absolute power.

Two dozen rebel members of his party, the Shiv Sena, gathered at a hotel named the Orange Megastructure, a favourite of the BJP official who ran Gujarat.

Thirty-five rooms were booked (some lawmakers had come with their assistants and at least one with her husband). More than 200 police officers were called in to lock down the hotel. Racks of clothes were wheeled in.

The defecting lawmakers had set off from Mumbai with Deshmukh and at least two other lawmakers they hoped to bring to their side.

Both of the others tried to escape before they reached the hotel in the diamond-trading city of Surat. One bolted from a car during a traffic jam. After walking for miles, he persuaded a truck driver headed to Mumbai to give him a ride.

“I was sweating. It was raining. I was getting wet,” said the lawmaker, Kailas Patil.

Deshmukh, 50 — a colourful first-time lawmaker who during an interview with The New York Times took off his shirt and asked a reporter to feel his flexing pecs (“Like a rock,” an aide said) — became a headache to the mutineers only after the group had reached the hotel.

Inside the resort, the breakaway lawmakers issued demands to the Shiv Sena leaders back in Mumbai: They would not return until Uddhav Thackeray, leader of both the party and the state, dissolved his coalition and stepped aside for a new governing coalition with the BJP.

Deshmukh was in touch with Thackeray, according to his own account, and wanted to leave right away. But the hotel gates were locked, and outside was a wall of police officers. Eknath Shinde, the Shiv Sena leader who had lured Deshmukh to Surat, showed his temper when Deshmukh said he would break the window and jump out.

“Shinde got mad and shouted at someone, ‘Bring me the pistol; I will finish myself here,’” Deshmukh recalled. “I said, ‘Sir, even if you kill me and kill yourself, I am still not staying.’” Shinde did not answer requests for an interview.

The two men had been brought to this point by months of manoeuvring by the BJP, propelled by cash and coercion.

The BJP was once an ally of Thackeray’s father, a cigar-in-hand political cartoonist who had founded the Shiv Sena with an army of Hindu vigilantes.

Shinde, a one-time auto-rickshaw driver who dresses in immaculate whites, was being groomed as an alternative to Thackeray, who had been painted as soft and inaccessible by the BJP as he tried to move the Shiv Sena toward the mainstream.

When the BJP began courting Shiv Sena lawmakers, according to several with knowledge of the discussions, some were paid millions of dollars to switch their allegiance. “In cash,” said Arvind Sawant, a Shiv Sena lawmaker in Maharashtra. The figures could not be independently verified.

Many had another powerful incentive to align with the BJP: They were under investigation by the BJP-controlled central government. Before the rebellion, Shiv Sena lawmakers had publicly urged Thackeray to “patch up” with the BJP so “the harassment” would stop.

BJP leaders, as well as the security officials involved in the Surat episode, declined to discuss details of the case, including allegations of cash payments. C.R. Patil, the BJP’s chief in Gujarat, played down his own role in the episode but acknowledged the party’s contribution. “It wasn’t my doing; it was the party’s,” he said.

Shinde’s associates denied that Deshmukh and other lawmakers had been kidnapped. “They weren’t children that we could have thrown in a car and taken by force,” said Bharat Gogawale, a lawmaker and Shinde lieutenant during the coup.

Political Fractures

On the night of the uprising, when Deshmukh was finally allowed to leave the hotel in the predawn hours, dozens of police officers broke away from a security cordon and followed him in the rain-slicked dark.

But as he waited for a ride promised by leaders of his party trying to save their government, he said, police tossed him into a vehicle and took him to a government hospital.

“I kept telling the doctors, ‘I am not sick; I am a lawmaker,’” Deshmukh recalled.

Around 5:30 a.m., before the sun came up, Deshmukh was pinned to the hospital bed, he said, and injected with sedatives. “Some tears came out of my eyes,” he said. “Then I passed out.”

The next day in the local newspapers, police in Gujarat — a dry state — were quoted as saying that the lawmaker had been found so drunk and unruly that he had to be taken to the hospital for treatment.

Eventually, he asked Shinde to let him travel home and calm his wife, who had lodged a missing-person complaint with police, as well as supporters who were angered by his treatment. If Shinde let him go, Deshmukh said, he would rejoin the rebels afterwards. But as the plane chartered for him landed, and Deshmukh saw hundreds of his supporters, he told Shinde’s men they could either take a hike or get beaten up, according to his own account.

A week into the uprising, after the mutinous faction had hopped from one resort to another across three BJP-run states, Thackeray finally resigned. He was replaced by Shinde.

“I don’t want to play these games,” Thackeray said in a televised statement. The insurgents danced on the tables at a Goa resort.

Not long after, the BJP went after another Maharashtra party, the secular Nationalist Congress Party, getting its No. 2, Ajit Pawar, to split from his ageing uncle, who had built the party over decades.

An early verdict on the Maharashtra chaos came this spring, in national parliamentary elections. The BJP lost more than half of its seats in the state. Pawar, the party’s new ally, fared even worse in the face of a wave of sympathy for his 83-year-old uncle.

But for Shinde, the chief benefactor of the 2022 rebellion, the results in the general election were promising. His faction won enough seats to keep him as the face of the governing coalition for the state election this past week when he improved in his showing.

Numbers from the campaigning period show how much money and muscle govern Maharashtra’s politics. The country’s election commission said it had conducted seizures worth nearly $80 million during the campaigning — ostensibly meant as bribes for votes. One study found that 60% of sitting state lawmakers faced criminal cases.

Through the frenzy of the national and state elections, Modi carried out nearly two dozen rallies in Maharashtra, swooping in to pitch himself as the undisputed guarantor of stability and continuity — and the ultimate gatekeeper for government benefits.

Shinde, in return, bet often and openly on Modi because he, of all people, knows that the powerful prime minister can turn a loss into a win.

“Modi makes the impossible possible,” Shinde said at one election rally with Modi seated onstage.

-New York Times