Newsmaker | Out of jail, Anil Deshmukh, the MLA who was always a minister, will hope for fresh luck

An NCP leader, he held the portfolio of Home Minister in the Maha Vikas Aghadi government when he was arrested in November 2021 following allegations by then Mumbai police commissioner Parambir Singh against him of collecting protection money from bars in Mumbai. While he was still in jail, the MVA government fell, and the new Shinde Sena-BJP regime did its best to keep him inside.

Hailing from a village near Katol in Nagpur district, Deshmukh started out as an Independent MLA. It was in this capacity in 1995 that he extended support to the Shiv Sena-BJP government at the time, which rewarded his support by making him a Minister of State for Education and Culture.

Deshmukh subsequently broke off ties with the two parties and hitched his wagon to the NCP, which was newly formed at the time. He won on the NCP ticket from Katol and made a leap into the big league when he was upgraded from Minister of State to Cabinet Minister in 2001, holding the charge of Excise and Food & Drugs.

Deemed to be media savvy, Deshmukh had his moment in the sun when, as Public Works Department (Public Undertakings) Minister in the Congress-NCP government, he oversaw the building of the ambitious Bandra Worli Sea Link. Sought out by media houses over the project, including foreign ones, Deshmukh was always willing to oblige.

In a shock for him though, Deshmukh was removed in a Cabinet reshuffle before the sea link was inaugurated.

In February 2008, Deshmukh found himself in the news when a mob of Shiv Sainiks lynched and beat to death a man in Deshmukh’s presence in Tarsa near Nagpur. Deshmukh was at the time campaigning on behalf of the NCP for a zila parishad by-election.

In 2009, Deshmukh managed to make a re-entry into the Cabinet, this time as Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Protection Minister.

After losing the 2014 elections to his own nephew, Deshmukh was written off, but clawed his way back and wrested his seat in 2019. He was considered an unlikely choice for the sensitive Home Ministry, and his ascension was attributed as NCP supremo Sharad Pawar’s desire to have someone pliable in one of the most important portfolios in the state government, headed by the Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray.

While the Parambir Singh allegations landed him in jail, Deshmukh had also faced criticism in April 2020 from retired IAS officer and then chairman of the Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Commission (MERC), Anand Kulkarni. In a cryptic social media post, Kulkarni had threatened to expose Deshmukh. “All his acts were governed by high ethical and moral standards. Highlights of his decade-long tenure were his transparent, speedy and straightforward handling of two areas: (1) Allotment of molasses to concerned stakeholders (2) Transfers of excise department officers. I have compiled documents of these honest activities and other areas. These include comments of the judiciary on his all-round ethos,” Kulkarni had said in his post.