Another One Bites the Dust..

Maharashtra chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh and his deputy are forced to walk the plank after mishandling of the Mumbai terror attacks

By Dilraz Kunnummal

Maharahtra has become the platform for the political blame game after the Mumbai terror attacks. It has indeed become a political playground of sorts. Not that it wasn’t one before, what with the Raj Thackarey-Udhav Thackarey competition to protect the Marathi Manoos against North Indians. But the first snakebite in this game after the Mumbai attacks was when Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister took along his son and an acclaimed film-director with him to visit the terror sites. His deputy RR Patil, actually told the media that what happened in Mumbai was a “small incident” that “can happen in big cities.” Both Deshmukh and Patil received a lot of flak for their handling of the state’s security and the high commands of Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Congress, who run a coalition in the state, asked the duo to resign.

Front runners to be the next chief minister included Sushil Kumar Shinde and Narayanan Rane but after Deshmukh’s resignation, caste considerations predominated and another Maratha, Ashok Chavan took the oath of office as the 15th chief minister of Maharashtra. The deal, as of now, is that Congress will have 22 ministerial berths in the cabinet and the NCP will have 24. After declaring its choice of chief minister, the Congress took another 3 days to finalize the names of 18 members to the cabinet.

But just as it was an issue during Deshmukh’s time, a divided Congress cannot decide who to award the remaining three berths to. After a gap of 5 years, the NCP’s Chhagan Bhujbal is back as the deputy Chief Minister. But the irony is that he was asked to step down in 2003 due to his alleged involvement in protecting Abdul Karim Telgi, the multi-crore fake stamp scam mastermind..

NCP chief Sharad Pawar, who dismissed the Mumbai carnage as ‘system’s failure’ chose Bhujbal as the deputy CM. The primary reason for Pawar to back Chavan was to neutralise Rane, who hit back at the decision saying that the only reason Chavan was chosen was because he is former union home minister S.B. Chavan’s son. Although Pawar’s favorite was said to be Shinde, his primary concern was to get rid of Rane.

Rane burnt his bridges when he said he had no faith in Congress president Sonia Gandhi anymore, which is the equivalent of lese majeste in the Congress. He accused the Congress of obsequiousness and said that the Congress only needs loyalists like Deshmukh. He was promptly suspended.

The others in the cabinet include Jayant Patil as home minister, Dilip Walse as the finance minister; education minister Vasant Puarke, Textile Minister Satish Chaturvedi and newcomers include Nitin Raut, Nasim Khan, Shobha Bacchav and Satish Patil among others. Many feel that the inclusion of Shobha Bachhav in the cabinet is to appeal to women voters in the state.

It took a good ten days for the exit of Deshmukh from his submitting his resignation to the election of Chavan. The reason it took so long for both the NCP and Congress to find a compromise. Maharashtra politics has become a treacherous vendetta game after the Mumbai attacks. In the run up to next year’s Lok Sabha polls, one can only expect politics in the state to become even nastier.


[This appeared in the in-house newspaper of the Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media on December 18, 2008. It came as the leader on the opinion & editorial page. Picture courtesy - Google images]