Sunil Gatade | After Ajit Pawar’s Passing, Bjp Has New Compulsions in Maharashtra

The desperation shows. The BJP’s pulling out all the stops to project Ajit Pawar as one of the greatest leaders contemporary Maharashtra has produced looks more like the politics of its compulsions.

It may sound strange, but despite taking centre-stage in the premier state’s politics, the world’s largest party remains uncertain about its future in the land of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. Despite its dominance, the BJP remains unsure of its stability to remain for long at the top.

Three years ago, the RSS and a section within the BJP were adamant that the party had made a mistake when the ruling Mahayuti welcomed Ajit Pawar into its ranks.

They insisted that Ajit was the most corrupt leader around and that bringing him along would be a huge risk for the image-conscious BJP.

In fact, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had spoken out against Ajit and his alleged Rs 70,000-crore corruption just two days before admitting the NCP leader to the Mahayuti fold, ostensibly to teach Sharad Pawar a lesson.

Another reason was that the BJP desperately needed a credible Maratha leader on its side, and the only one available was Ajit Pawar. He was a secular leader acceptable to all communities.

Interestingly, Eknath Shinde of the Shiv Sena, who was leading the government at the time, was also a Maratha, but Ajit was in a completely different league in terms of stature.

Furthermore, the BJP needed Ajit's support to make inroads in sugar-rich western Maharashtra, from where Sharad Pawar was drawing his strength.

The BJP’s tragedy is that it has failed to produce a Maratha stalwart or anyone who can compete with Ajit or Sharad Pawar, the Maratha strongman of the past.

What the BJP’s politics has done brick by brick over the last 40 years is to weaken Sharad Pawar’s grip on the state, even in recent decades when Ajit was his prominent lieutenant in state affairs.

Saheb, as the senior Pawar is known in state affairs, and Dada, as Ajit is known, were essentially entrenched rivals for the BJP, knowing full well that unless they are marginalised, the path to power was unclear.

So, the BJP deliberately allowed vicious campaigns against the Pawar duo. Whether Pawar Senior or Ajit were extreme villains was debatable, but a target was set.

Prior to making national headlines, Anna Hazare was involved in numerous activities in Maharashtra, most of which were directed against the Congress.

Recognising that the former Jan Sangh and its successor, the BJP, had a predominantly Brahmin-Bania character, the party went to great lengths to appoint a diverse leadership. The herculean effort culminated in 1995, when Gopinath Munde, the BJP’s OBC face, was appointed deputy CM.

However, the Pawar problem persisted and could not be eradicated. In fact, Munde’s single focus before and after becoming Dy CM was to target Sharad Pawar.

The BJP’s dual approach to Pawar Senior was visible in the 1990s, when Pramod Mahajan and Gopinath Munde were in charge of the Maharashtra BJP and took contradictory approaches to him in public.

Mahajan was friendly with Pawar, the then CM, and would frequently meet him for extended periods of time. On the other hand, Munde, his brother-in-law and the face of the party in the state, was lethal against Pawar, whom he used to portray as the epitome of corruption.

At the time, the Opposition used the wild allegations of a senior Maharashtra government official named G.R. Khairnar, a maverick, to relentlessly target Sharad Pawar.

Devendra Fadnavis’ formation of the ill-fated government with Ajit as deputy CM in 2019 was no coincidence or accident. Mr Fadnavis could not have committed the error without a green signal from Delhi.

This is despite the fact that Pawar Senior was instrumental in bringing the BJP, then a member of the undivided Janata Party, to power as part of the PDF coalition led by him. Sharad Pawar became the state’s youngest chief minister at the age of 39 in 1980, following what then-Congress chief minister Vasantdada Patil described as “stabbing me in the back”.

The Pawars have always hindered the BJP’s growth in Maharashtra, owing to the fact that Pawar Senior was a well-connected individual and one of the state's most hardworking leaders. It is another matter that he has also remained controversial.

When his NCP joined the ruling BJP-led Mahayuti three years ago, Ajit, 66, was always an outlier. RSS functionaries at various levels had objected to the BJP’s alliance with a “corrupt” Ajit, deeming it sacrilegious.

Interestingly, the Sangh appeared to have supported the BJP’s audacious act of causing a split in the Shiv Sena, the party's closest Hindutva ally until recently.

The essence of it all was that those who believed in the Sangh ideology were vehemently opposed to Ajit and his controversial past, believing that by aligning with the NCP, the BJP had unwittingly dug its own grave.

The Congress was weakened by Sharad Pawar’s parting of ways on the issue of Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin, and the BJP won half of the battle. The world’s oldest party attempted a self-goal in a Congress-friendly state at a time when its support was dwindling.

Post-Ajit Pawar, the BJP’s attempt is to totally dominate the politics of the state. A weak and rudderless NCP allows the BJP to advance its agenda while marginalising its other ally, the Shiv Sena led by Eknath Shinde, who has his own mind and is signalling that he must be counted.

In fact, the politics of Maharashtra has come to a crossroads, and the nimble-footed BJP is making all attempts to turn itself into a “double engine” by speedily taking along the feeble post-Ajit NCP, in a shrewd move aimed at gobbling it up.

The writer is a journalist based in New Delhi