Aditi Phadnis: Pawar play on a new pitch

It appears there are no limits to Sharad Pawar's ambitions. From aspiring prime minister of India to the power behind the chief minister of Maharashtra and now the chairman of the Board of Cricket Control for India (BCCI). What does this man really want from politics?

Pawar's politics are confusing. His party, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), was born out of opposition to Sonia Gandhi's foreign origins. Yet Pawar saw no incongruity in running a government in Maharashtra in collaboration with the Sonia-led Congress.

Then, he actually joined the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government with his colleagues, securing some plum portfolios. One of his colleagues, P A Sangma, parted ways with him on this issue.

Before this, in 1991, he questioned P V Narasimha Rao's right to become prime minister and threw his hat in the ring, only to withdraw it later and join the Rao government as defence minister.

So at least one parameter in Pawar politics is clearly that there are no permanant friends and no permanent enemies in politics. This enables you to make up your political line as you go along.

It is this flexibility that allows Pawar so much leverage in national politics. Consider the ideologically correct, consistent and 'pure' Left.

Instead of fighting the really big battles on behalf of India's toiling people, it is stuck in an exhausting polemic with some of the finest minds in Indian politics "" P Chidambaram and Manmohan Singh "" on whether Foreign Direct Investment is good for India or not.

On the other hand, Pawar's agility has enabled him to head a joint Parliamentary Committee on pesticides in water and beverages and virtually clear the way for cola companies engaged in selling soft drinks and bottled water.

It enabled him (in the last NDA government) to stay on as the chairman of the Disaster Management Authority with the rank of cabinet minister. And now, unfettered by self doubt over ideological core competence, Pawar is eyeing empires worth millions of dollars: the chief ministership of Maharashtra and the BCCI chairmanship.

The Maharashtra Assembly elections, due on October 13, will be as much of a challenge to the Congress as to Pawar. A master of coalition-building, he has managed to beef up the NCP by offering seats to allies at the cost of the Congress.

While this could mean a tactical victory for the NCP, it means finally, the number of rebel candidates from the Congress will be so large (on account of all those who have been denied nominations to make place for the UPA's family and friends) that it will further decimate the Congress.

The only ray of hope is the proven psephological fact: that the BJP wins elections only on the basis of an emotional wave and there is no wave in Maharashtra. The Assembly election will be close and virtually neck and neck with the NDA not far behind the Democratic Front. But at this moment it seems weighed in favour of the Congress-NCP alliance, which is good news for Pawar.

But it is the September 28 election for the chairmanship of the BCCI, where Pawar is turning out to be his enigmatic, dealmaking best. The picture is like this: Jagmohan Dalmiya, the businessman-turned-cricket administrator and head of BCCI, is stepping down.

Two of Dalmiya's greatest friends "" Raj Singh Dungarpur and I S Bindra "" have fallen out with him. Cricket has been dominated by players from the West Zone, which is also the most powerful in the BCCI. The West Zone appears to want to retain its primacy in cricket and therefore would like its nominee to be elected chief of the BCCI.

On the other hand, the North Zone claims it has its own candidate, the formidable Arun Jaitely, who has been taking an interest in cricket for the last several years, encouraging aspiring sportsmen. Jaitely is also said to enjoy the backing of Dalmiya who is himself the unquestioned patriarch of the Indian cricketing empire.

Because a president is due from the North Zone, Pawar has to be nominated from a cricket board from the north. The buzz is that Jammu and Kashmir might nominate him, though according to Bindra, his name has not come up from anywhere yet.

Pawar "" who, cricket aficionados claim, doesn't know a thing about the game "" has already made his opening statement. He wants the job, he said in Mumbai, because he wants to promote cricket in Maharashtra. But what about cricket in the rest of India? The statement has worried many cricket-lovers who are conscious of Maharashtra's stranglehold over the game.

Pawar's entry in the field of cricket, like so many other area, has given rise to plain politics here as well. Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad seems to believe that if Pawar, knowing nothing about cricket, can seek to become chief of the BCCI, there is nothing to stop him from getting active as well.

He has said that he favours the candidature of Arun Jaitely because his sons and sons-in-law have told him that is the right thing to do. Those committed to the cause of cricket are watching these pressures and pulls sadly.

They recall that when Madhavrao Scindia contested from the North Zone despite belonging to the West Zone, there were no political controversies. If cricket also becomes subject to the politics of power, heaven forbid, even quotas and reservations, what will happen to the game?

But the shrewd politician that he is, Pawar knows that cricket is a route to enormous publicity and power. Diplomacy hung by a thread last year as India agonised about the safety of its players going to Pakistan to play the Friendship series.

The whole controversy was triggered by a chance remark of some cricket commissar that it might not be safe to send Indian players there and that everything depended on what the Home Ministry said.

The incident proved that the chief of the BCCI is so powerful that he can pick up the phone to speak to the Indian prime minister and General Pervez Musharraf whenever he wants. Naturally, the high-profile, high-publicity job is a prize for any politician.

So Pawar has to win two series "" the Maharashtra Assembly and the chairmanship of the BCCI "" to ensure his political reputation stays unsullied. Both are, after all, about his kind of politics.