THE MAHA BONDING

At one time, Fadnavis, Shinde and Ajit Pawar were seen as an unwieldy trio with mutually subversive intent. A bumper assembly poll harvest inverts that

- Dhaval S. Kulkarni

If there was any trace of worry within the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) ahead of the big battle in November, they were good at hiding it. More likely, they were luxuriating in how well the Lok Sabha election had gone: 31 of Maharashtra's 48 seats, leads in 153 assembly segments. A comfortable buffer. Too comfortable. The Opposition triad fought over the fruits of war much before they had ripened. Meanwhile, there was another triumvirate, plotting away at a different script-the three horsemen of the MVA's apocalypse. Devendra Fadnavis, Ajit Pawar and Eknath Shinde: one allegedly not a mass leader, one with an apparently shrinking base, and one with his soufflé rising but perhaps not enough to pull up the other two. They gave the sense of being unequal to the task. That's what imparted the suddenness of an ambush to the Mahayuti's magisterial sweep.