Prithviraj Chavan is a Congressman of exceptional integrity, with good administrative experience and sound understanding of how Maharashtra and the Congress party work. He can make a success of his job. Maharashtra desperately needs a good government, a competent government, an effective government and a government that can turn a state on the decline around. After Mr Sharad Pawar’s brief tenure in the mid-1990s, India’s richest state has not had a decent government worth the name. Over a decade of incompetent rule has hurt the state enormously. On his first visit to the state in 2004, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed the hope that Mumbai would become India’s Shanghai. Today no one would even dare make such a statement for fear of being regarded a fool. Mumbai’s decline is not the only price the state has had to pay for the quality of governance it chose for itself. From farmers’ suicides to terrorism, from real-estate scandals to falling standards of governance, things have just not been going well with Maharashtra. And, more so when the state is compared to Gujarat which is on the march. So, Maharashtra deserves a highly educated, modern-minded, competent and decent chief minister like Mr Chavan. Question is, can he make a difference?
The chief ministership of a Congress state is at once the most difficult, complex and thankless job for a person parachuted from New Delhi. Mr Chavan will have to prove his credentials at the state level, keep all the party chieftains in good humour, keep the backroom managers of the party high command in the loop on every decision, keep Big Boss Pawar in good humour (Mr Pawar has been generous in his praise for Mr Chavan despite the fact that the latter is a known “Pawar-baiter” in the Congress), constantly genuflect to all the powers that be, and, at the same time, be able to crack the whip at minions below and get them to deliver. To begin with, Mr Chavan will have to give up his mid-day siestas. The working day is going to stretch to 24 hours and he will need to be awake most of the time. If he lands on his feet and can stand his ground, he has the opportunity of a lifetime — to give Maharashtra a clean and efficient government. For its part, the Congress high command and its minders must let him be and resist the temptation of back-seat driving and old-style puppetry. If Mr Chavan starts getting scared of his shadow and becomes risk-averse and non-enterprising like his older colleague in Andhra Pradesh, then he will be no more than Rosiah-II, and everyone in the state will be waiting to serve the next chief minister rather than the one in office, here and now. That would be a tragedy for Maharashtra. Mr Chavan may not have much freedom in choosing his ministerial colleagues, but he must select some good officers for important jobs. Civil servants can still make a difference at the state level and a chief minister can still run an effective government through good secretaries. We wish Mr Chavan well, but will keep a close watch on him. Mumbai, after all, is India’s business and financial capital.
