Three years ago, in December 2009, when Nitin Gadkari’s name was announced for the post of the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), most senior leaders who constituted the central leadership had not even heard it. But, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the parent organisation of BJP, was adamant to give him the charge of the party.
The reason for this decision was simple. Gadkari was close to those who mattered in Nagpur. And, he continues to enjoy their support even now, much to the dislike of a large section of the party that wants a more politically-active person to run the party. They believe the post of the president should be occupied by mass leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L K Advani. On the other hand, Gadkari, who had been part of the Maharashtra Legislative Council from 1989-2008, had never won an election.
Senior RSS leaders now want a second three-year term for Gadkari because they don’t want the top post to be occupied by anyone in Delhi. However, after changing BJP’s constitution and with just two months left until his first term expires, Gadkari finds himself in a crisis, with allegations of misuse of office while being the Maharashtra Public Works Department (PWD) minister. Specifically, he is accused of receiving money from infrastructure companies and supporting businessmen who allegedly benefitted in the coal block allocation scam. Gadkari has denied this, and has asked the government to investigate further.
Gadkari’s corporate style of functioning comes from his Purti Group of industries, which owns sugar mills, sugarcane farming, power plants and has several business interests in Indonesia as well. The ministry of corporate affairs and the income tax department have started investigating Purti’s source of funding, as well as the 18 companies that had invested in his companies. Gadkari finds himself being accused of allowing investments from companies that had allegedly given wrong addresses for themselves.
Gadkari has also been accused of awarding contracts to Ideal Road Builders Pvt Ltd as PWD minister between 1995 and 1999. The company, in 2001, made an investment of Rs 1.9 crore in equity shares of Purti Sakhar Karkhana Ltd in 2001 which was renamed Purti Power & Sugar Ltd in 2009. Ideal Road Builders became a subsidiary of IRB Infra in 2006-07. IRB has denied the allegations and claimed that investments were made when Gadkari was not in office.
The trust chord between RSS and Gadkari dates back nearly five decades, when Gadkari, a resident of Nagpur, was sent to join RSS by his mother, who believed in the ideologies of the Sangh parivar. Gadkari’s big moment in politics came when former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee named him the chairman of the National Rural Road Development Committee. He came up with the idea of giving money to state governments to build roads in villages. The scheme, started in 2002, was called the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojna. However, the problem was that the bureaucracy in Delhi felt the Union government would encroach upon the rights of state governments because building rural roads was a state subject. Gadkari convinced Vajpayee to overrule the bureaucracy and, instead, let him go ahead with the idea. Vajpayee agreed.
Similarly, during his tenure as the PWD minister between 1995 and 1999, Manohar Joshi, the-then Maharashtra chief minister, was impressed by his mega idea of building an expressway between Mumbai and Pune at a cost of Rs 3,600 crore. Joshi asked Gadkari to float a global tender which was won by the Reliance group under Dhirubhai Ambani. But, Gadkari thought the expressway could be made at a lower cost.
Gadkari defied Joshi and ended up starting the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation with a grant of Rs 10 crore from the state government. He raised another Rs 4,000 crore from the market through bonds and used the money to build the expressway for Rs 1,600 crore. The money was also used to build 55 flyovers across Mumbai in less than 18 months. A total work of more than Rs 8,000 crore was given by him to different contractors in his tenure as the PWD minister.
These are considerable accomplishments, but, he now has an uphill task to burnish his own credibility, even as his party struggles to find purchase despite the various hiccups its arch rival itself faces.
