So far, Ashok Chavan has acted sensibly, and a weak Opposition helps.
With few months left for the Assembly elections in Maharashtra (they must be held by November this year), Ashok Shankarrao Chavan — chief minister of the state for eight months — hasn’t yet revealed how he will win the elections for the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) alliance. However, he may have less to fear from his colleagues — unlike the chief ministers in the past.
Consider the music that accompanied Chavan’s elevation. The Mumbai carnage had just happened and a kicking and screaming Vilasrao Deshmukh had resigned from the chief ministership following a meeting of the Congress Working Committee. Narayan Rane, who had crossed the floor from the Shiv Sena in 2005, expected that, at last, he would get his reward and be made the CM. Deshmukh was equally firm that this would happen over his dead body.
When the two central observers, Pranab Mukherjee and A K Antony, reached Mumbai to oversee the election of the leader of the Congress Legislature Party (CLP), they saw pandemonium reigning. Rane was clear: “Ashok is too junior to me. I can’t work under him,” he said, and threatened to quit the party if Chavan was elevated. But a solid phalanx of the party did not want a relatively new entrant in the party to be made CM — this was largely Deshmukh’s effort.
It is not clear whether what followed was an unambiguous vote for Chavan or a referendum on Deshmukh — understandably, each likes to believe the CLP vote was actually his victory. But there was still Rane to be won over. And whether Chavan gave in to his insecurity when he approached Rane later to tell him that if they formed a united front they could keep Deshmukh in check; or whether this meeting was a measure of his confidence, we shall never know. At that time, however, the observers’ team said it would have to return to New Delhi and confer with the Congress President before the announcement. When he was appointed CM, Chavan behaved with becoming modesty. He asked Congress workers in Nanded (his area of influence) not to celebrate, for “people on the streets are not bothered about who becomes the chief minister or deputy chief minister. People’s priorities are different at the moment”. Since then, he has had no occasion to blot his copybook.
This is part of a piece. The son of former Home Minister and veteran Congressman the late SB Chavan, Ashok Chavan is as different from Vilasrao Deshmukh as is chalk from cheese. Where Deshmukh was high-profile, Chavan is quiet, almost studious. Deshmukh was at total odds with party bosses. He was responsible for the gubernatorial promotion of at least two ladies in the party: Prabha Rau, the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) chief and Margaret Alva, then General Secretary of the party at the AICC. The current MPCC chief, Manikrao Thackeray is a political contemporary of Chavan’s, although he is a Deshmukh-appointee.
Chavan has come to the party through the Youth Congress route. When his father became chief minister, Ashok Chavan contested the Nanded Lok Sabha seat vacated by him, for the first time in 1987-88. In July 1992, he was elected to the Maharashtra Legislative Council and became Minister for Public Works between 1993 and 1994. In October 1999, he was elected MLA for the first time from Mudkhed in Nanded and became a minister in Vilasrao Deshmukh’s first government the same month. He had to resign in the wake of the Telgi episode, as he was the revenue minister. He was drafted for party work after this.
In the 2004 assembly elections, he won by a margin of 71,000 votes, proving he could not be ignored. How did he win by such a large margin? Mainly because of the makeover Nanded got before the Gurta Gaddi celebrations: The 300th anniversary of Guru Gobind Singh’s declaration that the Sikh holy book was the eternal guru. The celebrations were held at Nanded which has only a small Sikh population but is considered an important holy city for the community because Guru Gobind Singh died here. Both the state and the central government pitched in for the infrastructure creation and nearly Rs 2,000 crore was spent over two years on the development of Nanded — otherwise, just a small and sleepy town in Maharashtra. This put Chavan in the state’s sight as possible CM.
As industry minister, Chavan claims it was his policy of attracting mega projects by extending concessions that prevented big industrial names from going to nearby Gujarat. By 2006, a clutch of car companies — Mahindra & Mahindra’s Rs 1,250-crore Logan and Ingenio car projects; General Motor’s Rs 1,237-crore project for small cars near Pune and Tata Motors-Fiat joint investment of Rs 1,500 crore at Ranjangaon, Pune — announced their intention of setting up facilities. Boeing chose Nagpur to set up its maintenance facility.
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But despite all this, so far, there has been no hint of a financial scam of any sort. Sometimes, politics translates itself into popular agitations against individuals. Although the demand for reservations for Marathas — one of the most powerful and affluent ruling classes in Maharashtra albeit, considered an Other Backward Class (OBC) — has been voiced, Chavan has pretended he hasn’t heard it.
If he doesn’t win the elections, he will be just another former chief minister. So far, he hasn’t said how he will beat back anti-incumbency. It is possible that the weakness of the BJP Shiv Sena in Maharashtra will become his strength. That’s what his supporters are hoping.