It is not likely to be, for a long time. But by fielding him in an Assembly election, the Congress has ensured it will have a face it can project in the future: not Narayan Rane or Ashok Chavan but Prithviraj.
Some facts about Maharashtra: the inherent strength of Maharashtra was its socialist movement. The state had an enlightened polity, tenancy reforms were undertaken in 1957, it has a full-fledged Panchayat Raj system and was the first state to have an Employment Guarantees Scheme in place. The monopoly purchase of cotton was a revolutionary concept. To protect cotton farmers from being cheated by traders, in 1972, the government became the sole purchaser of cotton from farmers through the Maharashtra State Cotton Growers Marketing Federation. Cotton was bought at an assured price and later sold in the open market to the mills and traders. This ensured an assured price for cotton to farmers but also brought politics in cotton farming. Later, maladministration and rampant corruption saw the federation sink into huge debt and it became a place where politicians who could not be given Cabinet berths were sent.
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Co-operatives were a part of the socialist legacy of Maharashtra but as business became bigger, the nature of co-operatives got distorted. Though co-operatives had money, a deputy secretary in the government was still more powerful than they were. They realised they had to control politics as well. Soon, it was the chief minister who was managing not just the co-operative but also the economy of the state. This put an end to the need for the politics of movement, mobilisation, struggle… Anyone who controlled a co-operative controlled a region. To be the CM, you needed to have co-operatives with you. That became Sharad Pawar's strength.
Chavan himself paid a price. Not only did he lose Karad, his family seat (both his parents had represented it), to the Nationalist Congress Party, but found himself pushed out of politics: until Rajiv Gandhi picked him up.
Chavan had studied at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, and having qualified as a design engineer, got a Unesco fellowship to study in Germany and from there on to the University of California in Berkeley in 1967-68. Having graduated, he joined Aerospace Industries and worked there for three years. Electronic design fascinated him and he returned to India to set up an R&D and design lab for information technology in 1974. In 1983-84, he met Gandhi, who wanted someone to develop a database for computing in Indian languages, so that land revenue records could be computerised. Chavan was developing a programme along precisely those lines.
The two clicked instantly and Chavan was given a ticket to contest from Karad in the 1984 elections as a "direct entrant". He won the election despite warning Gandhi that he would be resented by the existing satrap.
Gandhi waved all his objections aside: "There must be thousands of engineers better than you, but they can't win an election," Gandhi told him. Chavan won that election and all the following ones, increasing his margin each time, except in 1999 when the Congress split. He opted to stay with the Congress rather than go with Pawar.
It was generally expected that he would become minister when P V Narasimha Rao became prime minister. The chance came when Manmohan Singh became prime minister in 2004: Chavan was made Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office.
Then, as the Adarsh Housing scam broke, he was sent to Mumbai as chief minister.
Chavan realised the depth of hostility only upon reaching Mumbai. He was to be elected leader of the Congress Legislature Party. Balasaheb Vikhe Patil got the highest number of votes in that meeting, followed by support for Vilasrao Deshmukh and Sushil Kumar Shinde. Not a single legislator directly proposed his name. And yet, he was the one to get the job. Now, Deshmukh is dead and Shinde not strong enough to fight.
Looking back, Chavan considers some signature interventions that may have made him unpopular but will go down in history as structural changes. He limited floor space index (FSI) incentives given to builders, forcing them to share 40 per cent of the premium earned through the extra floor space with the state. He also announced they would have to share housing stock with the Maharashtra Housing & Area Development Authority (Mhada) in redeveloped buildings, instead of collaborating with Mhada and cornering the premium themselves. He reorganised training of the state bureaucracy by giving bureaucrats a more urban outlook, given that much of Maharashtra is highly urbanised and the IAS is trained to address the problems of a rural populace. But he freely concedes that the urgent reform that Maharashtra needs is to free the state from the education mafia because of which the quality of upper secondary education has gone to the dogs in the state; and corruption in irrigation, as only 18 per cent of Maharashtra is irrigated. So if rains fail, Maharashtra has had it.
Chavan is probably going to be consigned to a spell of being in the Opposition. But when the spell ends, he will the most important Congress leader in Maharashtra.