What was supposed to be a run-of-the-mill election to the Malegaon Cooperative Sugar Mill in Maharashtra’s Baramati district has now become a talking point in state politics.
With NCP president and Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar’s panel bagging 20 seats in the 21-member board of the Malegaon Cooperative Sugar Mill in its elections, the development is being seen as a further erosion of his estranged uncle and NCP(SP) chief Sharad Pawar’s grip on the cooperative sector in the state. For Ajit now appears to be dominating what was once Pawar’s bastion.
The Sharad Pawar-backed panel was routed in the Malegaon sugar mill polls.
Pawar has always been connected to cooperatives – in areas ranging from sugar mills to banks – in the course of his decades-long political career. The Maratha stalwart inherited the legacy of political heavyweights like Vasantdada Patil and Yashwantrao Chavan, who had in the early period of Maharashtra nurtured the fledgling cooperatives sector.
Pawar is credited to have strengthened the cooperatives sector, especially in ensuring its financial viability and building it up as a political powerhouse in the state. When Pawar decided to leave the Congress in 1999 to set up the NCP, a majority of the cooperative sugar mill barons in the state had backed him.
A Maharashtra cooperative bank’s former managing director said that Pawar has long understood the “link between political power and the cooperatives sector”. “Successful cooperative leaders were most likely to be successful politicians, especially in the sugar belt of Western Maharashtra. But for leaders to be successful, the cooperatives should have easy access to funds. Money is necessary to both keep the electorate happy and to ensure institutions are running well. And in the case of losses, help from the government in the form of easy loans, guarantees or favourable policies come in handy,” he said.
The cooperatives have, however, been both power centres as well as weak points for Pawar. For instance, sugar mills on an average have voter bases ranging from 20,000 to 30,000, and a successful chairman or director would be able to command a sizeable share of them in the local, state or national elections.
In the 2000s, the NCP was known as a Western Maharashtra party, given that most of its members and leaders were drawn from the cooperatives that lined this region. Ajit himself had started his career in the cooperatives sector, and it was here that he honed his skills as a politician and built his own support base that stood by him when he rebelled against Pawar in 2023.
Ajit made his electoral debut in the cooperatives, winning his first poll to become the director of the Baramati Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee in the early 1980s.
While Pawar became busy with politics at the state and national levels, local and cooperative politics were left to his nephew. From running the Malegaon Cooperative Sugar Mill to his directorship of the Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank, it was Ajit who ruled the roost.
Though cooperatives gave rise to a ready crop of leaders, they often sought proximity to power regardless of ideological affiliations. “There is a simple reason for this – being near power allows for easy access to funds, which somehow always seemed too short for cooperatives,” said a managing director of a cooperative sugar mill, adding that aligning with the parties in power always helped in the state.
Consequently, when power at the state level changed hands, the chances of cooperative leaders jumping ship would rise. “If one analyses the leadership of the undivided NCP, it was almost a collection of leaders who had come together for power. The grassroots-level penetration of ideology or the support base depended mostly on the leaders. Barring a few, every one else was amenable to jumping ship,” the managing director added.
When Ajit decided to split the NCP in 2023 and join the ruling BJP-led Mahayuti alliance in Maharashtra, a large section of the undivided party’s MLAs and leaders also joined him. Ajit, among other cooperative leaders, was facing multiple cases of alleged financial irregularities involving cooperatives, including probes by the Enforcement Directorate (ED).
After Ajit’s revolt, only a handful of senior cooperative leaders – including former state ministers Jayant Patil and Balasaheb Patil – stood by Pawar’s faction. The Malegaon sugar mill’s election appears to have further dented Pawar’s hold over the cooperatives sector in the state.
“The reason for the leaders’ mass migration (from the Pawar camp to the Ajit faction) is simple – they wanted to be on the right side of power. If anything, the Malegaon results have cemented Ajit dada’s base in the cooperative sector,” an NCP leader said.
