Manoeuvering for Election 2008: Maharashtra by Mustaf Khan

There is a straw in the wind. What does it tell? A coming wind storm. People in democracy are shrewd to know as soon as such a straw blows to them. National Congress Party of Maratha satrap Sharad Pawar has decided to try a new strategy on the seemingly ‘gullible’ voters of Dalit, Muslim and OBC communities. It has formed a social front organization called “Dalit, Muslim, OBC Ekta Sangh.” The truly benevolent Haji Mastan tried it once. He enjoyed a reputation that others in the underworld could not aspire to. What about Pawar’s credentials?

The overriding concern of DMOES would be to get maximum vote from the target communities cast in the ballot box. The calculation is that as the minorities vote en block their swing in favour of NCP would assure the party absolute majority in Maharashtra. It is no secret that NCP’s grouse is that they have majority in Mahrashtra assembly and yet the chief minister is not from their party. They have to play a second fiddle. To the manipulative turncoat that is the president of the party this is unacceptable. He would even now venture to go into another political wilderness to achieve his aims. NCP cannot aspire to be a broad spectrum national party despite its misnomer.
It is a party of the Marathas is also self evident. Bhujbal’s exception proves the rule as does Arun Gujarati’s. The Marathas themselves vote as a block. Their being divided in different parties produces a chemistry of change. It is this split in votes that NCP is trying tackle.

What are the tempting offers Pawar is holding forth to Dalits and Muslims and the OBCs? One, that the social front would give them a forum to air their views and grievances. Even when the people express them what redress? At the time of the bombing of the mosque in Malegaon Pawar had offered the minority leaders his support for a CBI inquiry. But they had to accept his tutelage. This flies in the face of logic no sooner than it is uttered. The home minister of Maharashtra is from his party. The people know that RR Patil is sitting on the files of the custodial death of Khwaja Yunus. Hence, he is obstructing the speedy investigation that the high court had been reminding the government for. Erstwhile Police Commissioner AN Roy had been lukewarm in dealing with the matter. If the people who are directly connected to Pawar are less than enthusiastic about such sensitive matters to the minority how could the new front on the cusp become trustworthy?

Vigilance is the price of freedom in democracy. People must remain free to choose and this is impossible unless they are well informed. How can the ordinary people be informed as much as the learned. Have we not been cautioned to be wary of the glib-tongued? The grandmother who cautions us to be so is using a layman’s strategy for defence. When the layman’s strategy is framed in words and given a conceptual framework it becomes a model lesson to others. There is an American novel called Losing Absalom (1994) by Alex D Pate. There is an African American family where the parents have brought up their son in the best tradition but his sister falls in love with a druggist. As the boy meets the lover of his sister he tries to find out if there is a critical weakness in him. He believed that all men had an essential critical weakness that other men could identify with swift precision. It could be a core of coldness in a warm peaceful exterior, a fear, a streak of terror carefully woven into the fabric of bravado, or, worst of all, a dark cynicism carefully tucked away in a hopeful body.

It cannot be daunting to look into the past of Pawar because he has enjoyed a public life of long variegated career. He has no Achilles’ heels, or else how could he be there? Yet there are interesting twists and turns in his life. On August 11, 2006 he acknowledged that he had deliberately misrepresented the facts during his stay in Mumbai when the riots were raging in December 1992 and January 1993. “To keep peace, I misled the people in 1993 blasts.” This must set off all alarms.

What can any one make of the report in The Times of India dated February 4, 1993 of how the Chief Minister Sudhakar Naik and other Maharashtrian leaders prevailed upon the police not to fire on rioters in Bombay after January 8 1993? The time is crucially important because it was on 8th and afterward that Shiv Sainiks had started massacring Muslims with the help of the police. Who were the other Maharashtrian leaders? SB Chavan was the Home Minister away in Delhi. The only other Mahrashtrian leader was of course Pawar. A Marathi local newspaper called Lokmat carried a report on February 18, 1993 of a Shiv Sena leader who had blamed the Defence Minister Sharad Pawar for his involvement in the communal riots which cost more than six hundred lives, mostly Muslims. Pawar had allegedly released hoodlums from jail to kill Muslims. Then on February 20, 1993 Chief Minister Sudhakar Naik warned that Congress must expel Pawar if it wanted to survive. The Home Minister was very shrewd and maintained silence until he left the ministry. Then he never kept it a secret that Pawar was directly responsible for the riots. In subsequent election campaign he openly blamed Pawar for the communal carnage. Another Marathi paper Kesari dated July 21, 1994 reported that Bombay Muncipal Deputy Commissioner GR Khairna had remarked that Dawood Ibrahim was responsible for the 1992 riots and Bal Thackeray for the 1993. He also said that Ddawood and Thackeray are special (khas) friends of Pawar. Therefore Pawar was implicated in the riots.

There is at best a Chankya type of situation where a Kautilya or deceitful trickster is maneuvering from behind the scene. His fingerprint is there not on the gun and hatchets but on the events. Shiv Sena leader Madhukar Sropdar was caught by the army in the streets of the city carrying unlicensed weapons. There was a notorious gangster with him. Who let him go? Bombay police had arrested him under National Security Act on February 6, 1993. He was not only released but was allowed to meet the Prime Minister! This could not have been managed either by Bal Thakeray or Sudhakar Naik. Chavan was above board.

In the aftermath of the Municipal election in Malegaon fools rushed to where angels fear to tread and the common man in the street who wanted alliance with the extreme right wing party to form a third front majority had the span of attention reduced to only a week. This smacks of the fact that the seemingly maverick mufti and the people are both uninformed. They should both learn at least the recent history. The forthcoming election in Mahrashtra must not become a chessboard of politics as the art of the possible and no-permanent-alliance in politics. Thackeray chooses to vacillate between regionalism and Hinduism but the fixed element is his extreme hatred of Muslims. He gives himself away as Javed Anand and Teesta Setalvad have noted in their critique of Mani Ratnam film Bombay.
Justice Bakhtawar Lentin described before Prime Minister Narasimha Rao during the latter's visit to the city in 1993:" In the last few days, the streets of Bombay have resembled the streets of Nazi Germany". In his infamous interview “Kick them out” to TIME magazine Thackeray famously said: “Have the Muslims behaved like the Jews of Germany? If so, there is nothing wrong if they are treated as Jews were in Nazi Germany". “If even my hair is touched, the entire community of my attacker will be destroyed”. (TIME, April10, 1995). He also demanded “legal Muslims residents to turn in their illegal neighbours or you will have only yourselves to curse for your fate.”

If this is the kind of leaders you have then it is your democratic duty to defeat them at the polls. For they believe in ethnic cleansing otherwise what else is their exclusion of the non-Marathi manoos or the non-kulaks? In this age of population shift and migration they are holding on to the hangovers of colonial mindset. The one who is asking you to turn in your neighbour is as totalitarian a demagogue as the other who favoured his neighbouring kulaks so much that he used up the water resources of the whole state and made others including suicidal farmers of Vidharb suffer. Michael Ignatieff in his The State of Belonging (TIME, February 27, 1995) says of them: “What is wrong with nationalism is not wanting to be master in your house but refusing to share the house with anyone but your own people. It is the idea that every nation must have its own state; it is the fantasy of ethnic purity. Whether we are nationalists or cosmopolitan, we are all mongrels under the skin. Our ancestors slept around, thank God, and there is not much real ethnic purity to be found anywhere in the world. If we cannot learn to share our states with our fellow mongrels, Yugoslavia shows us what fate awaits us.. The future does not belong to either cosmopolitans or nationalists, but to people prepared to a bit of both, willing to fight for the places they love, willing to learn from places they have never been.”