... And hunting with the hounds hasn’t hurt Sharad Pawar, at least so far
Prohibitions that apply to the rest of the world don’t operate on Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar. The world is told: You can’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. Sharad Pawar, Obama-like says: “Yes, I can”. For most of his political life, Pawar has done precisely this — run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.
As agriculture minister in the YB Chavan government in Maharashtra in 1975, less than 10 years after he entered the Legislative Assembly as MLA from Baramati (1967), Pawar internalised the full political and financial value of the sugar cooperative of Maharashtra. It took him no time at all to grasp the business model: Here was a highly profitable industry, raring to go, but shackled by political and bureaucratic controls. Those who held the controls, had the industry. AR Antulay managed to get Rs 5 crore for his Indira Gandhi Pratibha Pratishthan within a month of its launch, partly from the sugar cooperative cash stockpile. Rather than milking them, Pawar decided to organise the cooperatives. By doing so, he earned their respect and support.
From then on, it was his political line the cooperatives supported and followed. In 1975, Pawar was a Congress minister and remained one through the emergency. In 1977, when the Congress split with a faction following Devaraj Urs on the issue of the emergency, Pawar became part of that group — the Congress (U).
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Essentially Congressmen at heart, this group made Vasantdada Patil the chief minister with the support of the Congress (I), led by NR Tirpude. Patil thought the Congress (U), his own party, would never let him down. It did, through Pawar who negotiated with the Janata Party and toppled the Vasantdada Patil government. Patil said Pawar had stabbed him in the back. But in fact, it was a daring action on Pawar’s part — the hare and the hounds again.
The Congress (U) landed him the first of his four terms as chief minister of Maharashtra. But in 1981, Pawar decided to break from the past and renamed the party the Indian Congress Socialist (S). In 1986, Rajiv Gandhi negotiated Pawar’s return to the Congress but found himself unable to trust Pawar fully. The Maratha leader found himself banished to Maharashtra politics. Gandhi’s assassination gave Pawar the chance: He made his first bid for prime ministership.
If Pawar ever committed a tactical error, it was in 1991, when he found himself outwitted by a wilier Marathi-speaking Telugu leader, P V Narasimha Rao. Pawar’s campaign: Sharad for PM, was mounted on a lavish scale, raucous and loud. By contrast, Rao’s claim was low-voiced and confined to smoke-filled rooms. It was one of Rao’s closest friends, K Karunakaran, who conducted the exercise of ascertaining whom Congressmen wanted as the leader of the Congress Legislature Party. Congressmen would enter a room, Karunakaran would ask them briefly whom they wanted and record what he thought they wanted. Pawar lost. Rao made a great show of munificence and appointed him as the defence minister, but moved him back to Maharashtra in the wake of the demolition of Babri Masjid and riots. It was on Pawar’s watch that the Bombay blasts took place.
Rao lost the elections and a wave of coalition governments followed at the Centre. Pawar offered himself for the presidentship of the party, but lost to Sitaram Kesri. As the BJP was on a roll, he chose to leave the Congress in 1999. He launched the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) on the plank of opposition to a party headed by a person of foreign origin — convenient because when the BJP-led NDA came to power, he was offered the vice-chairmanship of the National Disaster Management Authority, a post that had the rank of cabinet minister.
The story of how he dumped the NDA and went over to the Sonia Gandhi-led United Progressive Alliance is well known — all that secularism stuff. The funny thing is, few know that today, the NCP is sharing power in the Pune Municipal Corporation with the BJP and if Suresh Kalmadi, the official Congress candidate loses the election, it will be because of its ally, the NCP. The NCP also has a foot in the Third Front, spearheaded by the Left parties. In Orissa, the NCP is supporting Naveen Patnaik’s government along with the Left parties. The Left apparently thinks Pawar’s tactical secularism is acceptable and could support him for PM.
The English say that if you’re too sharp, you run the risk of cutting yourself. Well, it hasn’t happened to Pawar — not yet, anyway.