Mumbai, April 20
Gopinath Munde, former Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra and general secretary of the BJP, today resigned from the party post to protest appointments of senior office-bearers in the Maharashtra unit without his consent.
Shortly after submitting his resignation as a party general secretary to BJP president Rajnath Singh, Munde said in a statement that he was quitting because he was unhappy about the appointment of Madhu Chavan as the president of the party’s Mumbai unit. “I have sent in my resignation because the party has stopped functioning democratically. I will now remain a common party worker,” Munde said.
Chavan is close to Nitin Gadkari, who is the Maharashtra unit chief of the BJP. Both Munde and Gadkari do not see eye to eye and have been at loggerheads for more than a year. Munde’s standing in the BJP has been considerably reduced ever since the killing of his brother-in-law and party general secretary Pramod Mahajan. Much against his wishes, Gadkari and other party leaders like Lal Krishna Advani pushed Munde to move at the national stage and occupy the post Mahajan held for many years.
However Munde, who is more of a grassroots leader, could not fill the political vacuum left by charismatic Mahajan and had made little impact at the national level. Differences between Munde and Gadkari worsened last year when the party organisation under the latter did not even invite Munde to address meetings during byelections to the Jalgaon and Erandol Lok Sabha constituencies. The bypolls were necessitated after the sitting BJP MPs had to resign for their alleged involvement in the Tehelka ‘cash for question’ scandal.
Since then, Munde supporters in the Maharashtra Assembly have also been sidelined by BJP’s leader in the House Eknath Khadse, who is close to Gadkari.
Rather than let Gadkari, a Brahmin with little grassroots level support, push him and his supporters to the sidelines, Munde has been quietly building an alternative base for himself in Maharashtra. Hailing from the Scheduled Tribe, Vanjari community, Munde has been
sharp enough to build a support base across other SC and ST communities like the Malis and the cattle-herding Dhangar communities.
In fact late last year, he shared a platform with Nationalist Congress Party leader Chhagan Bhujbal to ostensibly mobilise the backward castes and tribes of Maharashtra.
It also helped that Bhujbal, a Mali, himself is feeling suffocated in the NCP, which is controlled by the politically powerful Maratha community.
Both Bhujbal and Munde then openly invited backward caste MLAs from across the political spectrum to join them in espousing the issues pertaining to the Dalits, backward castes and minorities.
Since then there has been speculation that both Bhujbal and Munde may put together a formation comprising leaders from various backward castes and tribes that will shake up Maharashtra’s politics.
The Dalits and the Scheduled Tribes account for as much as 35 per cent of the population - almost equal to the Marathas and could emerge as a political alternative to the dominant community in Maharashtra.
For decades, the Marathas banded together under the leadership of Vasantdada Patil and later under Sharad Pawar to taste political success. However, the community has seen fissures crop up in its ranks of late, with the Congress trying hard to split the Maratha vote in order to cut Pawar to size.
It is this emerging vacuum that leaders like Munde and Bhujbal will hope to fill.
