Pawar protagonist in Maha political theatre

Radhika Ramaseshan

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Senior Journalist

Sharad Pawar and Mulayam Singh Yadav, separated by about a year, are more similar than they would imagine. Products of an era when the hegemony of the Congress was unquestioned, Pawar and Yadav periodically challenged its leadership, from within the party and outside its circumference as Pawar did or from the Opposition’s ramparts like Yadav.

The two leaders earned their spurs as regional satraps who nurtured national ambitions but did not fulfil their yearning beyond becoming senior ministers at the Centre. Pawar and Yadav subscribed to an elementary version of socialism that was underpinned on fostering the interests of their castes through institutions disbursing patronage and electoral politics. They were prone to making compromises with the day’s political establishment, largely unencumbered by ideology, except for using kosher terms like secularism when it suited them. Their politics made Pawar and Yadav singularly unpredictable as the Congress and the BJP realised every now and then to their consternation.

If in 1999, Yadav blocked Sonia Gandhi’s aspiration to bring up a Congress-led coalition at the Centre after the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government fell by rebuffing her plea to support, that very year, Pawar instigated a revolt within the Congress against Sonia because of her ‘foreign origins’ and split the party without bringing credit to the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in Maharashtra or anywhere else in the elections that followed.

While Yadav has quietly passed into the twilight of his career, Pawar is milling about, as kingmaker and king. He is the chief protagonist of Maharashtra’s political theatre, unfolding in sequence after bewildering sequence, after the last assembly elections saw the estrangement of the BJP and the Shiv Sena, its oldest ally. The latent ambitions of Uddhav Thackeray, the low-key Sena leader, to install a chief minister of his party, were fanned by Pawar to an extent where Thackeray virtually outsourced his fate and future to the 78-year old Maratha veteran. Pawar’s nephew, Ajit Pawar, who welded the NCP’s organisational nuts and bolts, jumped ship to do a deal with the BJP that anointed him as deputy chief minister. The Congress receded in the background, leaving Pawar to lead the show.

Pawar’s starring role was not serendipitous. It was the outcome of a shared perception that the Opposition campaign in the assembly elections was spearheaded by him, not withstanding his age, indifferent health, storms triggered within the NCP by Ajit Pawar’s tantrums and ego clashes with Pawar and his daughter, Supriya Sule, the large-scale defections that the BJP engineered and the allegation that his long-time political associate, Praful Patel, had struck real-estate deals with the deceased gangster, Iqbal Mirchi. Pawar took all this on the chin. The last straw was being named by the Enforcement Directorate in the Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank scam at which point, the warrior from Baramati took the BJP head on. Pawar offered to present himself before the ED, that he was persuaded by the Mumbai police to call off because by then, the NCP’s workers had clogged the streets around their party headquarter and the ED office, in solidarity with their leader.

Pawar, who once nursed a serious prime ministerial desire, at least pulled the NCP out of irrelevance and near oblivion by posting a reasonably good showing in the elections. Many of the BJP’s so-called big leaguers lost their seats because he campaigned with a vengeance against them and connected with the voters.

So, when Ajit Pawar joined hands with the BJP by a sleight of hand, what was Pawar’s predicament? The Congress — that by then underwent several pangs before endorsing a tie-up with the Sena at Pawar’s behest — suspected there was more to it than just Ajit Pawar crossing over without taking his uncle into confidence. The suspicion was Pawar could not have been oblivious of his nephew’s moves, at least not such an earth-shattering one. Nothing was conveyed to Pawar by the Congress but the questions that were internally raised were — why did Ajit Pawar turn turtle for the deputy CM’s post in a prospective BJP dispensation when he would have got the same position in one helmed by the Sena-NCP-Congress? Why was Pawar slow to give a support letter to the Sena? Why did he make ambivalent statements in the midst of a resolution that the triumvirate tried to hammer out? Why did the NCP set in motion a process that brought Maharashtra under President’s rule?

Most tellingly, Pawar’s call on PM Narendra Modi last week in Parliament deepened the misgivings of the Congress. The meeting was ostensibly meant to discuss Maharashtra’s agrarian matters but it was strictly one-on-one, without the presence of Pawar’s NCP colleagues who normally accompany him on such visits and of Modi’s bureaucrats who ought to have been present to take notes. Coupled with Modi’s copious praise of the NCP and the Biju Janata Dal in Parliament for their discipline, the developments raised eyebrows, particularly when efforts to form a non-BJP coalition were earnestly afoot.

Doubtless, Pawar later leaned over backwards to assuage the doubts of the Congress. He publicly distanced himself from Ajit Pawar, rallied around the NCP MLAs, including those who purportedly went with his nephew and assumed the role of a shepherd who would not only guard his flock but watch over the Sena and Congress legislators from being preyed upon by the BJP.

Pawar’s final test will come when the Sena-NCP-Congress combine proves its numbers on the floor of the House. After the resignation of Devendra Fadnavis and Ajit Pawar, the ascension of Uddhav Thackeray is a foregone conclusion. But if the NCP’s legislators abstain or defy Pawar’s directive and vote for the BJP, his conduct will be called into question. On the other hand, if Pawar pulls off the task of proving Thackeray’s majority in the assembly, he would have earned his place in contemporary India’s political history. Given his political caprices, who’s to say anything right now?