The NCP's offer of 'unconditional' support should be taken with a huge pinch of salt. No political party is ever as pious as that.

At this moment, it is certain that the Bharatiya Janata Party will form the government in Maharashtra.

Whether Shiv Sena will bury the recent bitter month’s developments and join the government, with the ruling front having some 186 MLAs on its side, or whether the Nationalist Congress Party’s outside support is accepted, is the big question.

Whatever the choice, the BJP has the potential to take Maharashtra on two different routes.

The first option provides a stable government. The second is of doubtful use because outside support can at best be tenuous, in times of crisis, of a day-to-day basis, depending on the political expedience of the moment. NCP can exploit that.

The suddenness of the unsolicited support offered by the NCP is of course characteristic of Sharad Pawar but it stunned both the BJP and the Sena, virtually rendering the latter speechless for almost the entire day after it had made an outlandish demand for chief ministership as a condition for getting back into the alliance.

Before getting into the intents and its consequences, here are a few significant messages thrown up by the outcome, which also include how both BJP and Sena strengthened their hold despite competing against each other on seats that had never been theirs.

The BJP has triumphed in the one-upmanship in the former intra-alliance dynamics. It is now the big brother.

For one, The Shiv Sena has lost its grip on urban seats known as its preferred playground. All the seats in Pune and Nashik were picked up by the BJP, as well as an unprecedented half of the total seats in Mumbai, indicating the dampening of the Marathi manoos issue. It also has a bearing on the assertion of the non-Marathis.

It can also be construed as the two parts of the original Shiv Sena – the Sena itself and its breakaway Maharashtra Navnirman Sena – have seen their constituents who root for the Marathi manoos coalescing towards Uddhav Thackeray’s leadership to combat this pressure from the non-Marathis.

If the Sena stays out of the government, it could sharpen as a major issue.

Two, regardless of who backs the BJP, one by being in the government, or another backing it from outside, there are a whole lot of consequences waiting to be felt in the years ahead. These stem from the hurried, but futile decisions of the Congress-NCP to win the elections. One is the burden cast by reservations for Marathas, Dhangars and Muslims communities. That can heighten social tensions in the course of time.

Three, however, the voters seem to have ignored the lures, making it possible for the BJP to garner the OBC, and Dalits to move with hope toward a development plank. This is where the performance of the government would count, and coalition dharma could be a hurdle. The grander the promise, the bigger the commitment. And delivery is everything. Both the Shiv Sena and NCP can jeopardise this for the BJP.

Also Maharashtra has lost its biggest opportunity to do away with the drag that coalition politics brings to a state’s administration.

Each party within a coalition, as the Congress-NCP government showed, behaves as if each is a government within a formal, legal government. That will hurt Maharashtra because both had ran amok and neither managed to curb the other.

How the government fares has everything to do also with the political acumen and ability of the chief minister. There is no hint yet about the choice.

And the NCP's offer of 'unconditional' support should be taken with a huge pinch of salt. No political party is ever as pious as that. It is likely that the party is reacting to the several charges made against it by both the BJP and Shiv Sena.

NCP’s anxiety, manifest in the haste with which its offer was announced, has to be understood. Traditionally, whether between the Sena-BJP or Congress-NCP, the smaller one gets Home, Power, Public Works, and Finance. These weighty portfolios make a smaller party disproportionately stronger.

These orient the outcomes on major projects that Narendra Modi has promised, and others conceptualised in the past, which need to be efficiently executed. They can be milked, not that the NCP didn’t when it could. That it did when Congress winked is important. The only difference is that it would rather not have the Sena at it.

If the NCP’s gesture is accepted, there are other outcomes it can engineer. By keeping the Sena out of an alliance with the BJP, it will weaken the Sena’s hold on local self-government bodies, like on the major municipal corporations like Mumbai, Thane and others in the Mumbai metropolitan region and elsewhere.

They include zilla parishads and panchayat samitis, the brick and mortar of rural power matrix.