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An Issue Of Adarsh

New CM Prithviraj ‘Mr Clean’ Chavan will have to get his hands dirty

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An Issue Of Adarsh
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At the end of long and drab corridors, after the ante rooms and the mandatory couple of staff rooms, on the sixth floor of Mantralaya lies the chief minister’s office. Prithviraj Chavan, the latest incumbent, may be unfamiliar with the layout but amongst his earliest challenges will be to lay down an unspoken policy on who will enjoy unrestricted and unlimited access to the CM’s chamber. This will play a large role in determining if he, now known as ‘Mr Clean’, will retain the image when he demits office.

Over the last decade or so, influential deal-makers (and deal-breakers), top builders and real estate developers, their agents and managers, representatives of powerful industrialists and the like have had easy access and audience with successive CMs. Ashokrao Chavan, the man who was axed as CM this week in the wake of his role in the controversial Adarsh Society, had attempted to restrict access in his early days. But like his predecessors, he too had retained the urban development department (known euphemistically as the cash-cow department because it has the last word on land and land-related policies) which meant a certain degree of comfort with a slew of land lobbyists. If Prithviraj Chavan decides to retain control of the department, he will have to revisit the visitor’s list for the sixth floor.

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Just how significant the land and developers’ lobbies are to the politics of Maharashtra was evident in the unease among them within hours of the announcement of a new CM on Wednesday. From the bureaucracy, political world and the media, everyone was keen to know if Prithviraj Chavan would keep the urban development department. Later that evening, a handful of powerful developers and builders met in south Mumbai to discuss the day’s developments—would business suffer if Prithviraj, as expected, took caution and care to urban development department decisions? The suggestion to their political friends was that the new CM should delegate it to “an experienced man” so business could continue. “This is after all the city where politicians are builders or vice-versa, chief ministers have had construction companies, and sons of important ministers walk in and out of developers’ offices at will,” points out a veteran Congressman and former minister.

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NCP boss Sharad Pawar, an old bogeyman for the new CM, with daughter Supriya Sule. (Photograph by Apoorva Salkade)

This is the murky side of the business of being Maharashtra chief minister. Prithviraj, a mechanical engineer with a post-graduate degree from Berkeley, will also have to deal with the seamy facet of state politics where factionalism and casteism form a toxic combination, where every ideology is represented by at least two variants (two Congresses, two Senas, multiple Dalit parties). He is a Maratha, that too from western Maharashtra (Kumbhargaon in Karad, Satara district), but it’s also where his defeat in the 1999 Lok Sabha polls was engineered by another, more powerful Maratha—Sharad Pawar. Prithviraj must now consign to working with Pawar’s nephew—the aggressive and ambitious Ajit Pawar—as his deputy. At once, he must keep things smooth between the Congress and Pawar’s NCP, while also ensuring his party consolidates its base among the Maratha community at the cost of the partner.

Though his parents were grassroots politicians—father Anandrao and later mother Premlatabai represented Karad for close to 40 years in the Lok Sabha; Chavan Sr was also in the Union cabinet of different prime ministers—Prithviraj himself has little experience of the wicked ways of state politics. Since he took on Pawar in 1999—when the latter challenged party president Sonia Gandhi over her “foreign origins”—and lost, the new CM has kept his distance from state politics (though party sources say he has been keeping tabs from Delhi). “I don’t have any baggage,” Prithviraj told the media in Delhi as he prepared to leave for Mumbai.

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Baggage he may not have, but blessings he does and in plenty from the PMO, his party president Sonia Gandhi and general secretary Rahul Gandhi. Says a former cabinet minister from the Congress, “We know he has great access to both the high command and the prime minister...that makes him very powerful. He has a mandate that few CMs before him did.” Still, Prithviraj will have to carry the NCP section of the government along, and that’s easier imagined than done. In the portfolio-sharing formula, the NCP has cornered most vital departments such as home, finance and industries. Political analyst B. Venkatesh Kumar says, “The coalition government in the last 11 years has often meant two parallel mini-governments, each with their own allocated departments. It will be a big challenge for Prithviraj Chavan to get his government to function as a unit, and to chip away at the NCP base. It will need a political acumen different from what he displayed in Delhi whether as parliamentary affairs minister or MoS in the prime minister’s office. Still, he seems to have the capability.”

The Opposition will not make it any easy. Already, the guns are out. Says bjp’s Eknath Khadse, Opposition leader in the state assembly, “It looks like the Congress didn’t find any of its 82 legislators suitable for the job. Let’s see how Prithviraj Chavan deals with state issues and corruption.” The next few months will also test his capacity to pull off another balancing act—with the Shiv Sena and MNS battling it out for control of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, the Congress is looking at a unique opportunity to wrest control of a civic body with an annual budget in the region of Rs 17,000 crore. But given the party’s recent history of surreptitiously aiding the MNS, it will be a tough call to oppose its candidates across the city. “It will be his first acid test, politically speaking,” remarks a city Congress leader.

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The state’s wide polarities and disparities will present its own dilemmas. Prithviraj’s stint in the PMO has hopefully familiarised him with issues like agrarian crises, farmer suicides, shrinking agri output, land conversion policies (from agricultural to industrial or residential), and also international financial capital which is increasingly looking at destinations other than Mumbai and Maharashtra. “We look at every new person with hope...let’s see what Prithviraj brings to the blighted lot of cotton farmers in Vidarbha,” remarks Kishor Tiwari of the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti, which has agitated on the issue for  a decade. Prithviraj doesn’t have to look far for a reality check—his village Kumbhargaon still suffers from six-hour power cuts, poor roads and an inept sanitation system.

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All said, he carries his own rare experience of having seen and dealt with bureaucracy from close quarters. It may give him an edge in overhauling a state bureaucracy that stands as (if not more) tainted in the Adarsh Society scam as the politicians. As many as 16 bureaucrats at the middle and senior levels, who could have come in the way of the Adarsh Society development, are members; this tells its own story. Even in the hamhanded handling of 26/11, politicians lost their jobs but bureaucrats and police officers indicted by the Ram Pradhan committee not only kept theirs, but were even promoted. “The state administration is seen as an inefficient and vastly corrupt one, largely delivering to its own people, select politicians and the influential class. Prithviraj Chavan will have to revamp it and bring back accountability, beginning with the CMO itself,” says Venkatesh Kumar.

It’s a long and difficult to-do list. Should he deliver, Prithviraj will be a hero within his party and his state. On Thursday, right after his swearing-in, the new CM seemed headed in the right direction. Prithviraj Chavan and his deputy Ajit Pawar, in a symbolic gesture, visited Mani Bhavan to “take the Mahatma’s blessings” and later Chaityabhoomi to pay respects to Dr Ambedkar. If he makes their path his own, the new CM could be the best thing to happen to Maharashtra in a long while.

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