Eye on Maharashtra: The ‘impotence’ of BJP in Maharashtra

One can only exclaim – goodness gracious! In all my long years as a journalist, I have never come across such word play before. It is not just that the BJP as a party is highly frustrated at being diddled out of power in Maharashtra. But there is a whole history of personal misjudgement and the subsequent denial of the fruits of office that has now got its individual members losing control and indulging, if not in abuse, in unsavoury verbal exchanges that do not gel with the usually exemplary tradition of Maharashtra.

The latest in this war of words now is the contretemps between the Pawars and the Vikhe-Patils, a battle that goes back at least six decades when Sharad Pawar was a school boy studying in Ahmednagar and had marched at the head of his school mates to the gates of the Pravara sugar co-operative factory to demand its shutting down for a day in support of the liberation of Goa.

Pawar’s older brother was an agricultural officer at this factory, so he probably thought he had a right to demand the closure. But Vithalrao Vikhe Patil thought otherwise. Now Vithalrao was the doyen of the co-operative movement in India which continues to be the backbone of both the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party and a sector the BJP had tried hard to break into with little or no results.

Moreover, Vithalrao then had the distinction of having India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru fly all the way to Ahmednagar to make the acquaintance of the man who had come up with such a brilliant idea in the interest of farmers and then was among the first recipients in the country of a Padma award from the Nehru government. So he was certainly not going to lose time and money by giving in to the childish demands of a 12-year old - and to this day Sharad Pawar has not forgotten that denial.

The rivalry between the Pawars and the Vikhe-Patils has influenced much of the politics of Western Maharashtra over the decades. Vithalrao’s son Balasaheb Vikhe Patil had had to quit the Congress to join the Shiv Sena when Pawar’s growing powers as a politician and over the co-operative sector became unsustainable. His stint in the Vajpayee government in the Centre in the late 1990s was meant to curtail Pawar’s influence , with little effect.

But with the Congress in his DNA he slunk back to the party after Pawar split the Congress in 1999 and his son Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil was able to live with the NCP while he was a powerful minister in the Congress-NCP government in the state. Then he suffered an error of judgment – as his son was denied a ticket to the Lok Sabha on Pawar’s say so in 2019, he had Dr Sujay Vikhe-Patil join the BJP and win that election even as he, strangely, refused to resign as leader of opposition representing the Congress in the Maharashtra assembly.

Critics had lambasted the Congress for failing to take action against Radhakrishna’s attempts to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds but then close to the assembly elections in 2019, Radhakrishna gave the Congress another deep cut by quitting and joining the BJP. He would have got a plum ministry in the BJP government but the Pawars proved to be once again the bane of the existence of the Vikhe-Patils and he had to continue sitting in the opposition , this time with the loss of his status as leader of the opposition with all its trappings – of course,that chair is now occupied by Devendra Fadnavis.

Despite all attempts to bring down the Maha Vikas Aghadi government , fortunes have not changed hands and now a frustrated Sujay Vikhe Patil has labelled the NCP as the “husband” in this unholy alliance, with the Shiv Sena its wife and accused the Congress of playing gooseberry.

Usually the Shiv Sena is swift to retort but this time, knowing that the battle is essentially between the Congress and the BJP on the one hand and the Pawars and the VikhePatils on the other, it has remained silent and allowed the Congress and NCP to do the fielding. Former chief minister Ashok Chavan in whose cabinet Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil was agriculture minister – thus frustrating all Sharad Pawar’s moves to gain upper hand in Maharashtra as union agriculture minister in the UPA years, has been mild-mannered in reminding the Vikhe-patils of their essentially Congress origins.

But the NCP, which is refusing to readmit its former members who had deserted the party to join the BJP ahead of assembly polls in 2019 has had the sharpest retorts.

The truth of the BJP’s aggression against the MVA is its awareness that more than half its members originally belong to the NCP and could jump ship any moment that Pawar gives the green signal. If that were to happen, they would pave the way for a return of Congressmen too who had joined the BJP and the VikhePatils would be on the winning side once again.

But that is unlikely to happen soon and while Deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar has dismissed the Vikhe-Patils as empty vessels who make more noise than warranted, it is the usually soft-spoken London School of Economics graduate Jayant Patil who has surprised all with his unkind cut. “Impotent people bear no fruit, so we do not need to comment on them,” Patil who is the Maharashtra NCP chief said.

It has rendered both the BJP and the VikhePatils speechless because in the Maratha tradition one cannot overstate one’s macho image and even the old-fashioned Sharad Pawar had emphasised on being a “mard Maratha” unafraid of the government when the ruling Party had unleashed the central agencies on him in 2019. That response is what probably consolidated the Maratha votes behind the NCP and created a situation for its return to government.

So, emphasising the impotency of the BJP is a deliberate cut by the NCP which is unamused that two of its ministers have been targeted and jailed by the central agencies at the behest of the ruling party at the Centre.

Clearly, the MVA is in no mood to tolerate the BJP any longer and if reports of it gathering its own files against state BJP leaders are correct, showing them down as impotent is only the first step in shaking their base among the voters.

Obviously, this is not happening without the consent of Sharad Pawar. The battle reminds me of boxer Mohammad Ali’s warning to his rivals – you kill my dog, you had betterhide your cat for I am coming to get you.

And how!

(Sujata Anandan is Consulting Editor, National Herald, Mumbai)

(This was first published in National Herald on Sunday)

(Views are personal)