A Pawarpoint presentation

The upshot was that the foreign origin issue came to fore again in the run-up to assembly elections. It also reinforced the impression that Pawar is the tallest leader of Maharashtra today, even though he may not be an undisputed one. Aware that the Congress could not afford to let the impression get around that it could not manage the states where it is in power, Pawar knew that the party would blink first. He could, therefore, afford to take a moral high ground and state that he was willing to let the government go but would not compromise on the issue.

The Congress managed to turn back from the brink. But the damaging part of the affair was that the man who had mounted the staunchest defence of Sonia Gandhi was the one who had to eat humble pie. Ranjit Deshmukh was made the fall guy.

There is little doubt that Pawar is moving to a plan. It is also true that he is more comfortable with Atal Bihari Vajpayee than with Sonia Gandhi, and this is also true of Mulayam Singh Yadav. The first stage of the plan is to queer the pitch for the Congress in the coming assembly elections. Congress victories here would make Sonia unassailable and, recently, with a good monsoon, Congress prospects had started to improve in the four Hindi states.

The second part of the plan is to try and form the government in Chhattisgarh. If V.C. Shukla is able to do this with the help of the BJP, it will serve as a role model for breakaway groups and an invitation to disgruntled Congressmen to part company with the mother party. Chhattisgarh has become crucial for Pawar. Without going into the merits of the cases against Ajit Jogi, the timing of the pincer movement against him is curious. Pawar is clearly trying to position the NCP as the alternative pole to the Congress. The NCP has already formed a non-Congress front in the Northeast with the BJP and regional parties.

Pawar is also positioning himself for 2004. Given its growing unpopularity, the BJP tally is expected to decline, and the Congress may not be able to revive beyond a point. The political space vacated by the BJP will be occupied by the regional groupings which make up the third pool of politics.

Of course, what happens next year will depend on the arithmetic of the 14th Lok Sabha. But Pawar is keeping in close touch with Mulayam Singh Yadav, Jayalalithaa, Ajit Singh, H.D. Deve Gowda, Chandrababu Naidu and Chandra Shekhar, with a view to forming a loose group. He has a personal rapport with these leaders. They, too, consider themselves as potential primeministerial material, if they can get 30 Lok Sabha seats.

Pawar has the added advantage of having close links inside the Congress and Congressmen concede that he may have manouevred the situation to get Vilasrao Deshmukh removed as CM—a mistake the Congress made—and bring in Sushilkumar Shinde who has proved to be ineffective. The party could not win his seat, Solapur and was mauled in the recent Jalgaon municipal corporation polls.

What happens in October 2004 will hinge on how Pawar fares in Maharashtra. He would like to delink the assembly elections from the Lok Sabha polls. This would enable him to forge a pre-poll alliance with the Congress in the assembly elections, and Sonia Gandhi’s “foreign origin” need not be an issue in state polls; bargain hard for a 50:50 division of tickets; make a bid for chiefministership if the combine wins; and consolidate his hold on the state before the Lok Sabha polls. The more he can weaken the Congress in the coming months, the greater will be his bargaining power, and the Congress’s need of him. He would like assembly elections to be held in February-March.

Whether or not he succeeds, Pawar is certainly putting his plan in place. The Congress is not yet clear on how to deal with him. Nor on the kind of alliance to forge with him, if at all. Indeed, after the BJP, it is Sharad Pawar who poses the biggest challenge to Sonia Gandhi today. The party has to contend with a peculiar situation, in which those who are its allies overtly — like Sharad Pawar and Mulayam Singh Yadav — are its foes covertly. But then that is the paradox of today’s coalition politics.