The Shiv Sena may have been forced to cede ground in seat-sharing with the BJP for the Maharashtra assembly elections, but the party hopes to gain in a post-poll scenario by ensuring a strong bench strength in the House. The Sena is planning to use these electoral gains to drive a hard bargain with the BJP for favourable power-sharing terms, especially for the CM's post for two-and-a-half years. According to their seat-sharing pact with BJP, the Sena will fight from 124 of the 288 assembly seats. The rest will go to the BJP, which will also have to accommodate its four smaller allies. In addition, the Sena has been promised two seats in the state legislative council from the BJP's quota. In 2014, the Sena could get 63 MLAs elected, next to the BJP, which had 122. The Sena also has 12 MLCs in the 78 member legislative council. "To come to power with favourable power-sharing terms, it is necessary to ensure a good strike rate on the seats allocated to us. There was no point in getting more seats from the BJP, if constituencies which could not have yielded little electoral success to us were put in our kitty," a senior Shiv Sena leader told DNA. "Our priority now is to ensure that we get a good number of legislators elected to the lower house and then use these numbers for bargaining with the BJP for a favourable power-sharing deal and portfolios like home," he explained. Yuva Sena chief and Shiv Sena leader Aaditya Thackeray, who is Sena president Uddhav Thackeray's elder son, will contest from Worli in Mumbai, and is being soft-projected as the party's face for the position of chief minister or deputy chief minister. The Shiv Sena leader said the alliance with the BJP was a given despite the obvious compromises that they had to accept. This was because the Sena lacked the resources to take on the BJP in constituencies across Maharashtra if they had to fight separately and the likelihood of some incumbent party legislators and functionaries jumping ship to the BJP for better chances of getting elected. The Shiv Sena, which traditionally has a wide social base than the BJP, has been in a pre-poll alliance with the BJP from 1989 to 2014, and this seat-sharing had affected their strength in some constituencies and regions, where the BJP had traditionally contested from. The BJP had also succeeded in ensuring that regional and sub-regional satraps with substantial "elective merit" had joined their ranks than that of the Shiv Sena. "The Shiv Sena essentially has the character of an opposition party," he explained, adding that however, the party needed to get a larger share in power by tying up with the BJP. The Sena leader claimed that by and large, the party cadre had reconciled themselves to the fact that they had to ally with the BJP, even on adverse and unequal terms, with their long-term interests in mind.

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