Political Power When Pawar first broke away from Congress in 1978, he did not have much hold over western Maharashtra. He began making inroads into local institutions such as cooperative banks and sugar factories. Then, says the general manager of a district central cooperative bank in Western Maharashtra, not wanting to be identified: “As sugar factories became an important source of political capital, it became important to control funding to them.” Take the Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank, India’s largest cooperative bank. In 2011, mired in losses and with a negative net worth, its 58-member board was dissolved. “The ratio would be 64% NCP, 34% Congress and 2% others,” says a senior manager of the bank, not wanting to be named. “We had to lend even to sugar companies with a negative net worth.” About half its loans are to the sugar sector, and 57.3% of this amount is under default. Today, in western Maharashtra, NCP leaders, and local satraps with them, control a number of rural institutions, in sugarcane and milk, credit cooperatives, village societies, APMC yards, the bodies that control local development plans, etc. Vast patronage networks emanate from these institutions—employment, loans to farmers, buying their produce, etc—and disobedience comes at a price. “Cooperative institutions are purely democratic in nature,” counters Pawar. “A number of political parties participate in elections to cooperatives…NCP, also being a political party, participates in the election process.” In this construct, politics and economics feed each other. “MLAs spend Rs 10-20 crore on elections,” says Anil Patil, a Shiv Sena MLA from Madha, Pawar’s constituency. Sugar is central to this. “Other crops do not throw up the money that cane does,” adds Patil. “This can be used to create a political structure.” To protect its interests, this structure needs political power. Says Palshikar: “The people who control NCP are in western Maharashtra. They want to keep the NCP in their hands so that it protects their interests.” For the same reason, the NCP has not expanded even within Maharashtra—geographically, or beyond its traditional Maratha vote bank. When asked, Pawar says: “I think commentators should not worry about growth of political parties.” Since 1990, key ministries in the state have been with MLAs from western Maharashtra. The resulting outcomes can be stark. During the debt waiver of 2008, despite the largest number of suicides being reported from the Vidarbha region, a report by current Planning Commission member Narendra Jadhav, who was the vicechancellor of Pune University at the time, states the region received 20% of Maharashtra’s share of Rs 9,896 crore, while 53% went to western Maharashtra. In the early-90s, Pawar was a regional leader, which was not enough to succeed in Delhi. And so, says Palshikar, he had to create a new base. Creating that through agriculture be torturous—different castes dominate in different states, and it is hard to establish oneself as a leader. “What Pawar has tried to do in the past 10 years is build alliances with state-level leaders than with rural populations,” he adds. All those relationships will come into play in these elections. Anything seems possible at the moment, and the survival artist is not showing his cards just yet.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 10:30:24 +0000