Newsmakers of the Week | Sena’s Sanjay Raut, former CMs Digambar Kamat & Panneerselvam

Throughout the two-and-a-half years of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government in Maharashtra, if there was one politician from Maharashtra who managed to constantly stay in the news, it was Sanjay Raut, the Shiv Sena’s chief spokesperson and its four-term Rajya Sabha member. While many saw Raut’s hand in Uddhav Thackeray’s 2019 decision to break the Sena’s 25-year alliance with the BJP and join the MVA along with its traditional foes, the NCP and Congress, he is now being blamed by rebel Sena MLAs for “damaging” the party. As the long-standing associate editor of Saamana, the party mouthpiece, Raut was until 2019 known mostly for his acerbic editorials, but came into the limelight after the Assembly elections that year. Read Vallabh Ozarkar’s report on the man who is now under the ED scanner in an alleged money laundering case.

Former Tamil Nadu chief minister O Panneerselvam

Till the end, O Panneerselvam or OPS kept fighting, in the party and outside it, from the High Court to the Supreme Court. This week, the 71-year-old seemed to have finally hit a dead end, after being expelled from the AIADMK along with his aides. Simmering for long, the latest crisis in the AIADMK started bubbling last month after the E Palaniswami or EPS faction proposed that the party go back to a single-leader system to check its successive poll debacles since 2019. The current system, with OPS as coordinator and EPS as joint coordinator, had been introduced in 2017 to end disputes arising after Jayalalithaa’s death. At the time, OPS had only 11 MLAs but was propped up by the BJP, which nosed its way into a party still reeling from Jayalalithaa’s death. He was also seen as close to RSS ideologue S Gurumurthy, and later Sasikala. Now though, OPS stands alone, with BJP leaders admitting that there are no channels open for him to join them.

Former Goa CM Digambar Kamat

Five months after he led the Congress’s campaign for the Goa Assembly polls, the Congress Working Committee’s permanent member and ex-chief minister, Digambar Kamat, has now been accused by his own party of allegedly plotting with new entrant Michael Lobo and the ruling BJP to engineer the defection of eight of its 11 MLAs. The Congress is also seeking the disqualification of Kamat and Lobo as legislators. On his part, Kamat has maintained that his supporters have been upset ever since his erstwhile Leader of Opposition (LoP) position was given to Lobo in the newly-constituted Assembly. Kamat was divested of responsibilities in the state as part of the Congress’s bid to promote its Gen Next leaders. Kamat is among the Newsmakers of the Week.

Punjab’s Bains brothers

Known for his firebrand politics that involves conducting “sting operations” to barging into government offices, Lok Insaaf Party chief and former MLA from Ludhiana’s Atam Nagar, Simarjeet Singh Bains, now finds himself on the other side of the fence. A year after he was booked in an alleged rape case filed by a 44-year old woman and three months after a local court in Ludhiana declared him a ‘proclaimed offender’, Simarjeet finally surrendered in court this week, along with his brother Paramjit Singh Bains alias Pamma and three other accused. Of four siblings, popularly known as “Bains brothers”, Simarjeet and Balwinder Singh Bains are two-time former MLAs from Atam Nagar and Ludhiana South, respectively. Their clout extended far beyond the two Ludhiana seats that they represented between themselves. Divya Goyal brings you this report on the Bains brothers.

IAS officer Ashwini Bhide

Among the first moves of the Eknath Shinde-led government was to reverse the previous MVA government’s decision to shift the Metro car shed project from Aarey Colony to Kanjur Marg. The government also brought back Ashwini Bhide, the IAS officer who helmed the Metro project under the previous Devendra Fadnavis-led BJP government. Bhide’s return as Managing Director (of the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation is a sign that the government intends to double down on the Metro project, especially the Metro 3 Corridor, a 33.5-km underground stretch from Colaba to Seepz. As Metro chief during the BJP-Sena government’s tenure, the outspoken Bhide had been the face of the controversial Colaba-Seepz Metro-3 project until she was removed in January 2020, soon after the MVA came to power. Read Shubhangi Khapre’s report on the IAS officer who worked on some of the big-ticket infrastructure projects in Mumbai.