Nistula Hebbar: No more an outsider

BACKSTAGE

In an address-conscious city like Mumbai, his place of residence is all wrong. Unlike his predecessor Murli Deora "" whose house is in fashionable south Mumbai "" Mumbai Region Congress Committee (MRCC) President Gurudas Kamat lives in the more plebian Chembur.

But it was Kamat's understanding of the neighbourhood that helped turned the tide in favour of the Congress "" after more than a decade of Shiv Sena dominance "" in the elections last week.

Made famous by R K Studios, Chembur is a middle-class suburb filled with non-Marathis: Bunts from Mangalore, Tamilians, Biharis and UP-ites. Kamat's insistence on potraying an inclusive Congress, and making that the focus of his campaign, paid off rich dividends.

When he took over from Deora in March 2003, after the latter had held sway for nearly 22 years, there were many who felt that Kamat's homespun style would not reel in the big bucks needed to resuscitate the party.

They couldn't have been more wrong. In the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress won six of the seven Mumbai seats, with Kamat winning from Mumbai North East. Not surprisingly, when Kamat invited industrialists to meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on October 6, there was a full house.

All talk that Deora had been roped in to infuse the party with funds at the last minute was proved wrong.

Kamat's strategy during these polls, according to his closest aides, was a repeat of what he did to defeat BJP leader Pramod Mahajan during the 1996 Lok Sabha poll.

He went to every ward in the city and got in touch with the actual voters. And his tour across the city brought home to him the fact that Mumbai has more of the rest of the country in it than just Maharashtra. Hence the tone of the campaign.

His aides say he has no truck with power brokers, preferring to do his own talking. That's understandable, considering he began his career in politics as an NSUI leader while training to be a lawyer from R A Poddar College, Mumbai.

Kamat was noticed by Rajiv Gandhi when he organised a huge rally in Nagpur in 1983-84. Gandhi soon made him Youth Congress President and Kamat fought his first Lok Sabha poll in 1984. He has been re-elected to the Lok Sabha four times, losing only in 1999 to the BJP's Kirit Somaiya.

Kamat has demonstrated his intense loyalty to the Nehru-Gandhi clan time and again, earning the trust of Sonia Gandhi, enough to dislodge Deora who had long been an obstacle in his ambitions.

Although he was close to Sharad Pawar at the height of Pawar's tussles with then Congress president Sitaram Kesri, Kamat was the first Maharshtra politician to attack Pawar when he broke from the Congress over Sonia Gandhi's foreign origins.

He is also known to be on friendly terms with Shiv Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray, but not enough to blur any party lines. A nuts and bolts man, Kamat has a core team of aides: Amarjeet Singh Minhas, treasurer of MRCC, Jagannath Shetty, MRCC Secretary Dharmesh Vyas, General Secretary Deepak Sisodia, Arif Naseem Khan and Ajit Sawant were all roped in by Kamat.

And they are unquestioningly loyal to him. They are all are from north east Mumbai, Kamat's Lok Sabha seat. That's also the seat of much heartburn and the cause of strife with Deora and the city's big north Indian leader and minister, Kripa Shankar Singh.

There was a time when Kamat's non-Marathi origins (he was born in north Karnataka in 1954) could have been held against him. After all, it was not so long ago that the Shiv Sena rode to power on the "Mumbaikar" wave.

But, as his detractors point out, at the right time even this is an advantage. With Mumbai more cosmopolitan than Marathi and the "outsiders" more politically aware of their option, Kamat has become the man of the moment.