Letting Rane go will split the Congress vote and help the BJP-Shiv Sena and Pawar.
It is now almost certain that not only will the resignation of Narayan Rane, Maharashtra’s revenue minister, be accepted with ill-concealed glee by the Congress party, but he will also form his own party that could have an unpredictable effect on both the Congress and the Sharad Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party.
The subtext is the struggle for the No.2 spot among the Marathas — Sharad Pawar continues to be the undisputed No 1.
Complicated?
The bitter war of words in Maharashtra, that culminated in the revenue minister (arguably the second-most important man in the government) storming out of a cabinet meeting in Mumbai, announcing he’s going to quit from the government and hotfooting it to Delhi, has been caused by the nature of the verdict thrown up after the Assembly elections in the state in November 2004.
Although the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) was the single largest party with 71 MLAs out of 288 (144 are needed for a simple majority), it yielded the office of chief minister to the Congress after throwing a hissy fit. Party supremo Sharad Pawar, quite rightly, calculated that his party would be in the government anyway but would hold the chief minister in its thrall and earn his eternal gratitude if the NCP were to shore him up at that point. As chief minister, fellow Maratha but nominal caste leader Vilasrao Deshmukh suited everyone: He was no threat to Pawar, he was at daggers drawn with his ‘handlers’ in Delhi and he understood the pressures and pulls of corporate politics. In a word, he was mould-able with careful handling.
But in 2005, the unexpected happened. After a long spell of skirmishing, the Shiv Sena split. Following differences between party heir apparent Uddhav and his cousin, Raj Thackeray left the party to float his own outfit; and angered at consistent marginalisation, Narayan Rane left the party.
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Rane is a Maratha, belongs to the Konkan region and has been a Shiv Sainik for 30 years. Combine the three and it is not hard to work out the way he thinks. If Pawar could tolerate a Maratha, why not Rane? After all, he had at his command all the skills garnered as his career as a Shiv Sainik: The network of Konkan followers in Mumbai. Konkan runs on a money-order economy — anyone who is employable lives and works in Mumbai, so it is easy to get things done in Mumbai if you are a Konkani. If you are Konkani Maratha, your sense of bonding is strengthened: Marathas from Western Maharashtra and Marathwada don’t consider you a Maratha at all and look down on you — hence Rane’s repeated statements that he is a 96 kuli Maratha (ie, high born).
The challenge for the Deshmukh-Pawar duo was to manage Rane; keep him in good humour but keep him contained. Deshmukh’s Delhi handlers were pleased. They now had their own man in Deshmukh’s government (on the assumption that Deshmukh was not his own man and was run by Pawar). Every time there was some rumour that Deshmukh was being replaced, not only would some envoy of Pawar say that as it was a coalition government, they needed to know who the replacement would be, but serious instability in Maharashtra was indicated.
Rane, no fool, forbore for a while but beyond a point, got seriously irked. What is more, with his seven MLAs (six got re-elected in the bye-elections) he figured he was the one who had brought the Congress into the green — for the first time since 2004, it was numerically larger than the NCP and therefore, able to talk to Pawar from a position of strength. This confidence should have translated into policy decisions, but for some reason, that didn’t happen.
What Rane could have done is played one side against the other — Sharad Pawar against Vilasrao Deshmukh. Instead, he kept talking to Delhi in the hope justice would be done, while all the time, discrediting Deshmukh and his government in Mumbai. Understandably, Deshmukh loyalists — and those who wanted to be seen as loyalists — seized upon this to speak out in his favour as loudly as they could. The rivalry reached its zenith and exploded in front of Sonia Gandhi, when she was invited to a rally to present a united face of the Congress to the people of Maharashtra and was instead forced to watch open-mouthed as one group of the Congress beat up another in an extremely public slugfest a month ago.
The political situation in Maharashtra is now teetering on the edge. The script for Rane’s exit has already been written: The Congress calls itself an aam aadmi party but gives away land to industrialists who can afford to pay for it. His exit will only mean the Sharad Pawar group in the government will be strengthened. But in the long run, Rane acting as the spoiler in the Konkan that sends 21 MLAs to the Assembly can only weaken the Congress. In that case, Sharad Pawar and the BJP-Shiv Sena will have the last laugh. But that’s the Congress for you: Never failing to shoot itself in the foot.