On the comeback trail

Under tremendous pressure then to seize the option to bid forgovernment, he defied then party president and Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao to take a leaf out of Rajiv Gandhi’s book and voluntarily submit his resignation to the Governor. Then, despite the misgivings of his colleagues and friends, he sat back in the hope that the Sena-BJP would be unable to govern and collapse under its own contradictions.

It was a calculated risk but Pawar was determined that neither he nor the Congress be seen as power hungry. And that the people who cried: "Give them a chance!" should be taken seriously. Pawar reckoned that the Sena-BJP would mess up on its chance. If not, they deserved to rule anyway.

In the three years since the reigns in Maharashtra were handed over to the Sena-BJP, it seemed that the wily Maratha would, for once, be proved wrong. For the Congress was racked with a series of setbacks, failing to dominate not just the subsequent Lok Sabha polls in 1996, but also losing many zilla parishad and municipal elections in 1997. The Congress rank and file weredisheartened. Even Pawar’s core supporters were overheard grumbling that neither he nor they seemed to "get" anything at all out of his extended — and self-imposed — exile in New Delhi.

But then Pawar was astute enough to spot the factors that were keeping the Congress from making a good show in Maharashtra: divisions in its rank and file, the alienation of the Muslim masses and the split in the Dalit votes. All three seemed impossible to overcome. But helped by one-time detractor A.R. Antulay’s volte face on building bridges with Pawar, the former Chief Minister held out his own olive branch to other Congress strongmen like S.B. Chavan and Sudhakarrao Naik. As early as July 1997, during the organisational elections, he decided to hand over 35 per cent of the executive positions in the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee to the Opposition within the party in order to avoid a contest. In return, he swung the job of MPCC president for his own nominee, Ranjit Deshmukh.

And it is from this point on thatthe Congress, perhaps, began to glimpse a winning chance at the next elections, though no one expected it to come about quite as soon as 1998 or in such ample measure. In recent years, Deshmukh has proved to be among the most active of Pradesh Congress presidents. He lit fires in all camps and got MPCC executive members going. Assigned with specific responsibilities, all party functionaries were asked to activate Congress cadres down to the villages and prepare a report card on the Sena-BJP government’s perceived failures. These were put together to produce a `Black Paper’ on the Sena-BJP alliance, which not even Bal Thackeray’s reply contained in a `Saffron Paper’ could counter.

Energised by the leadership at the top, Congressmen began planting their tricolours beside the Sena’s saffron standards all over the villages of Maharashtra. At the time it seemed silly, but it was a means of registering their presence and a reminder to the voters that the Congress was not quite decimated as yet, that they stillhad a choice.

Top ranking leaders, too, played along. Equal credit should go to leaders like Chavan and Naik who decided to play second fiddle to Pawar, recognising his supremacy as a campaigner and strategist and allowing him to take complete charge. Both had earlier flirted with the Sena-BJP in a bid to limit Pawar. Their turnaround now baffles the Sena supremo.

Thackeray also failed to grasp the Congress’ essentially democratic nature of functioning: there was an appeal from among the grassroots workers for their leaders to seal their differences. They protested the impossibility of the situation when they had to constantly look over their shoulders to see which of the factional leaders they stood to annoy.

Says Charan Singh Sapra, president of the Brihanmumbai Pradesh Youth Congress: "The writing on the wall was clear: if the party failed to survive, we would be virtually non-existent. Our ideology makes it impossible for us to join hands with the Sena-BJP. So this time factional feuds were put onthe backburner as we decided we were all working for the party and not individual candidates or leaders. We were fighting for our future rather than for just power."

Even the Maharashtra Pradesh Youth Congress ran an inspired campaign to woo the 18-25 year old voters back into the Congress fold. Led by president Anees Ahmed, the villages of Maharashtra witnessed the unusual spectacle of hordes of motorcyclists, flying the Congress tricolour, who visited each tiny hamlet to ferret out at least one youngster who might have been provided a job by the Sena which had promised employment to 27 lakh jobless youth in the State in 1995. They tom-tommed the fact that they could not locate any, despite the Sena having raised Rs 4 crore through various charities, including a Michael Jackson show, for the purpose.

"Where did all the money go?" queried Chhagan Bhujbal, the militant face of the Congress which eventually brought this response from the people: "the Congress might have filled its stomach to capacity but atleast they left a few crumbs for the people". Now, with essential commodities unavailable in the fair price shops, demolished homes rather than free housing to slum dwellers and jhunka bhakar being consumed by the likes of Amitabh Bachchan, Inder Kumar Gujral and K.R. Narayanan, those who benefit from this subisidised meal scheme across the villages of Maharashtra saw that they did not have even those crumbs.

But even all these mistakes on the part of the Sena-BJP might not have been enough had it not been for Pawar’s farsightedness in tying up with the Samajwadi Party and the Republican Party of India despite opposition from other Congressmen in the State as well as the party leadership at the Centre. Defying Sitaram Kesri and working round the apprehensions of Chavan and others, Pawar began wooing the Muslim and Dalit vote early by putting his money where his mouth was and leaving them eight of the 48 seats in the State.

That the strategy worked was evident when Dalit blue and yellow flagsoutnumbered Congress tricolours at all of Pawar’s campaigns in rural Maharashtra and that both he and Bhujbal could spot ample number of Muslim skullcaps in their crowds as they systematically demolished the fear of Thackeray from the minds of the people in even the Sena strongholds. Pawar realised early that Muslim ire against the Congress had peaked at the last elections and that the community has less qualms now about the party than about the BJP which, they had decided, must be stopped from gaining the Centre.

The third group that voted for the Congress were the Marathas who always tend to go with the ruling classes. In the aftermath of the renaming of the Marathwada university after Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, they were alienated from the Congress in general and Sharad Pawar, who accomplished this difficult task, in particular. But in the interregnum they found that the Sena, which had opposed the renaming, had done little to include them in the business of governing. Instead, the institutions run by them– like sugar co-operatives — were systematically demolished by the ruling alliance.

This Maratha-Dalit-Muslim axis is now being described as one of the Congress’ two winning `MADAMs’ in Maharashtra. The other, of course, was Sonia Gandhi. The Pradesh Congress does not minimise the effect of her rallies in the State. If her crowds translated to votes here, unlike elsewhere in the country, it is because the MPCC had a strong and motivated cadre who made sure that the effect percolated to the masses, says Deshmukh. Pawar himself describes Sonia as the "practicals" of a science examination. And gives he full marks. But even he was zapped at his own score. "The result was beyond my expectations," he said, both bemused and gratified. Not a surprising reaction, considering it has been seven long years since Congress drew a smile in Maharashtra.