Bhujbal plays a political gimmick

While leaving the Sena, Bhujbal had cited the Sena’s opposition to the Mandal Commission report and taken a moral high ground while shifting his loyalty towards the Congress. There was, however, another important reason: Bhujbal was hurt when Manohar Joshi was made the leader of the Opposition in 1990. The appointment of Joshi, a Brahmin, came as a jolt to Bhujbal, who was emerging as a leader of the OBCs in Maharashtra. The Mandal issue was topical and Bhujbal parted ways.

In 1999, Bhujbal became a founder member of the NCP. In 2003, when he became the deputy chief minister, he dug out a case against Thackeray and got him arrested. The hostilities continued and manifested in the defamation case after the Ramabai Nagar firing incident in which 10 Dalits died and Saamana blamed Bhujbal for engineering the desecration of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar’s statue that led to the riots. The case was filed in Nashik court to make Thackeray travel all the way from Mumbai and when he did, Bhujbal was jubilant. All these years, he maintained that he would not withdraw the case until Saamana published an apology. On Friday, however, Bhujbal called a ceasefire to his hostilities with Thackeray, unconditionally, taking pity on the Sena chief who is 81 and ill.

Bhujbal is scheduled to celebrate his 61st birthday on October 15 and senior NCP leader Praful Patel is the convenor of a committee formed for the celebrations. However, Bhujbal seems to be far from happy in the party. His supporters point out that when the Congress-NCP came to power in 2004 in the state, he was made the PWD minister and sidelined, irrespective of the fact that he was the deputy chief minister in 2003.

For the past three years, he has been grooming himself to become a pan-Indian OBC leader and his social outfit — the Mahatma Phule Samata Parishad (MPSP) formed in 1992 — has opened branches and organised rallies in several states, including Delhi.

In May this year, the MPSP went public about being persecuted by the intelligence wing of the police force (controlled by his party colleague and Deputy Chief Minister R R Patil). They said that the state Government did not want the MPSP to grow because it would make Bhujbal a pan-Indian OBC leader.

Last year, while celebrating his birthday, Bhujbal had predicted a political earthquake, leading to speculation that he would break away from the party to form a new outfit of the OBCs. Significantly, OBC leaders like Gopinath Munde (BJP) had attended his birthday bash.

Perhaps one of the reasons for Bhujbal’s distress was that NCP chief Sharad Pawar had almost disowned him when his name was thrown up in the Telgi stamp paper scam. Or maybe he felt isolated and alienated in a party that’s dominated by the Marathas.

Bhujbal has been vocal in taking up issues of concern to the OBCs like scholarships for students and raising the creamy layer. Because of his efforts, the state Government had raised the income criterion of OBCs from Rs 3 lakh per annum to Rs 4 lakh per annum in the state last year to ensure that greater number of OBC families enjoyed the benefits of reservations.

His gesture towards Thackeray may have stemmed out of the fact that Pawar and Thackeray are good friends and that doing so would earn him some goodwill to help him consolidate his position within the party. The gesture has come at a time when the Deshmukh Government is mulling over the idea of introducing reservations for Marathas, which Bhujbal has opposed on grounds that they would eat into the OBC quota. Bhujbal has mooted a separate quota for Marathas. He may be aiming at projecting himself as a martyr for the OBC cause yet again (after the 1991 break-up with Sena).