Eknath Khadse vs Devendra Fadnavis: Experience is an advantage, but youngsters can have the aces in Maharashtra

Sulking since his unceremonious departure from the Devendra Fadnavis-led Maharashtra cabinet in 2016, BJP leader Eknath Khadse resigned from the party to join the NCP on Wednesday, directly blaming the former Maharashtra chief minister for his departure.

Khadse lashed out at Fadnavis after resigning from the BJP, claiming that the former prime minister instructed the police to implicate him in a bogus harassment case. Speaking of how he “suffered” in the BJP, Khadse said: “The then CM (Fadnavis) ordered the police to register the FIR against me for a false accusation of harassment by a woman. He said the case would be dropped further late. The investigations for corruption were initiated against me in which I came out clean. ” Khadse said that Fadnavis tried to destroy his (political) life.

Meanwhile, Fadnavis played down the allegations, saying his former BJP colleague was telling only the “half truth.”

“If he had complaints about me, he would have told the elders of the party,” Fadnavis said. Calling Khadse’s resignation unfortunate, Fadnavis said: “It would have been better if he hadn’t resigned.”

“I will not talk about this today, but I will do so at the right time,” Fadnavis said, adding that Khadse had painted him as a villain while making the accusations against him.

However, despite Fadnavis’ explanation, the decline of Khadse’s fortune can be mapped alongside the former’s rise in the BJP.

Khadse’s departure was a long time in coming: from being defeated by Fadnavis in the race for the prime minister’s presidency in 2014, to becoming number two in the cabinet, Khadse finally reached his lowest ebb when he couldn’t even secure a ticket. for himself in the 2019 polls. Furthermore, Khadse is neither the first nor the only one to blame Fadnavis for his misfortunes.

Fadnavis vs. Khadse

Fadnavis came to the fore in 2013 as a result of a cold war between the two factions of the BJP led by Nitin Gadkari and Gopinath Munde. After the decisive victory in the 2014 elections in Lok Sabha, the top leadership accommodated the two main leaders in the Central Cabinet while the command of the state BJP was handed over to Fadnavis.

After Munde, considered the top ministerial candidate, was killed in a car accident months before the Maharashtra elections, many expected the role to pass to Khadse, another strong face of the OBC in the party and a longtime loyalist to Munde. .

However, the BJP top management surprised everyone by choosing a relatively younger and inexperienced Fadnavis. The perceived reason was that in Munde’s absence, the BJP did not want to side with either faction and supported a neutral man to run the state while Gadkari was asked to continue his responsibility as Union minister.

The party, however, could not ignore a leader the size of Khadse. He was named number two in Fadnavis’s cabinet and had up to nine luxurious handbags at the time.

Within two years, Khadse became embroiled in controversies with a questionable land deal in Pune and an alleged bribery lawsuit by his close aide Gajanan Patil for a land adjudication case in Kalyan. Aside from these dubious real estate transactions, her mobile phone number allegedly appeared in the call logs of the most wanted gangster, Dawood Ibrahim, sparking the fury of the opposition.

Pune’s land grab case came to light when builder Hemant Gawande named Khadse and his family members, claiming that they purchased a three-acre plot of MIDC land in Bhosari for just Rs 3.75 million.

Khadse, for his part, dismissed all allegations saying that the land in Bhosari MIDC belonged to a private owner and the transaction was completed by the books.

Then there was also the issue of the multi-crore irrigation scam in which Khadse is also embroiled. Social worker Anjali Damania alleged that the Tapi Irrigation Development Corporation (TIDC) awarded projects that were unfeasible and not required to contractors sponsored by Khadse.

Another controversy erupted after Manish Bhangale, an ‘ethical hacker’, claimed that seven calls were made from Khadse’s number between January and March last year to the underworld don Dawood Ibrahim, Hindustan Times reported.

Khadse denied all these allegations and stated that he was willing to face any investigation into the allegations against him.

The central leadership of the BJP maintained a neutral stance and left the ball in the court of Fadnavis. The rest is history.

Once promoted to be the prime minister and one of the most powerful leaders of the Maharashtra BJP, Khadse was forced to resign as minister and did not get a ticket from his seat that he has represented six times since the 1980s. Fadnavis also opened several investigations against Khadse.

Critics Say Fadnavis Killed Competition Within BJP

Stacks of newspaper sheets were devoted to profiling Fadnavis after the BJP’s victory in 2014 and in the run-up to his 2019 re-election. Journalists and political pundits spoke about Fadnavis’ calm, calm and quiet demeanor. However, opinions began to change in a couple of years, as all those who were once considered contenders for the position of prime minister lost influence and were affected by controversies.

Khadse was the strongest competition for Fadnavis. After Munde’s death in 2014, Khadse emerged as the face of the OBC in both the BJP and the Maharashtra government. He belongs to the politically assertive Levedar Patil community that once supported Congress but had joined the BJP since Khadse’s rise. Meanwhile, Fadnavis is a Brahmin, a community that makes up only 3 percent of the population of Maharashtra. Khadse is a grassroots leader and considered a force to be reckoned with in northern Maharashtra, where he worked hard to make BJP a household name. Fadnavis, was the center of attention after being elected as the youngest mayor of Nagpur, where his father was a prominent leader of Jana Sangh and was close to the RSS.

But within two years of coming to power, Khadse lost favor with the central leadership amid accusations of corruption.

Later, the Maharashtra anti-corruption bureau gave Khadse a clean fine in the Pune land grab case and the Maharashtra Lokayukta also closed the investigation against him in the bribery case involving his “personal assistant” Gajanan Patil. The ‘hacker’ who had made accusations about the Dawood link was later booked by the Mumbai police for forgery.

But Khadse was not reinstated in the cabinet, nor was he assigned any position in the party.

Since then, he has made no secret of his dislike for Fadnavis.

Khadse believes that Fadnavis deliberately entangled him in these cases to keep him out of power. Khadse had also alleged that activist Anjali Damania had filed a complaint of sexual abuse against him for his speech and the police had registered a case in that regard on the instructions of Fadnavis. The leaders of Congress and the Shiv Sena share the same point of view.

Former Maharashtra Prime Minister and Congressional Leader Narayan Rane also blamed Fadnavis for Khadse’s public fall from grace.

“Fadnavis took Khadse’s window,” Rane said at the time of Khadse’s departure from the cabinet.

“On the one hand you (Fadnavis) give him a clean account and on the other you go to Delhi and ask the party to take Khadse’s resignation and also announce that the (BJP) president will declare a decision on the matter,” he added. . additional. “CM should have told him to resign and informed him that an investigation into the charges would take place. But this public humiliation was unjustified,” Rane said.

Shiv Sena, then a BJP ally, also pointed the finger at Fadnavis in a scathing editorial in the party’s spokesman. Saamna at the time.

“Khadse might have thought that Devendra Fadnavis, a boy from yesterday, would not understand politics. He thought it was the government. But he did not realize that the boy from yesterday was packing the (fire) cracker with gunpowder,” Sena said. , adding that ACB was behind Khadse’s PA Gajanan Patil for a long time, but Khadse had no idea about that.

Other strong leaders such as Pankaja, Munde’s daughter, and main leader Vinod Tawade, were also embroiled in controversy. In 2019, Pankaja lost the pitch to his cousin Dhananjay, while Tawde didn’t even get a ticket. Khadse was also denied a ticket, but was reassured after his daughter received a ticket from her seat in Muktainagar. Khadse alleged that his daughter lost her seat because BJP cadres worked against her on Fadnavis’ instructions. He had also attributed the loss of Pankaja to the Fadnavis camp during an earlier event, stating that Munde’s daughter did not lose in her own territory, she was defeated by her own people.

Senior BJP leaders such as Prakash Mehta and Chandrashekhar Bawankule were also sidelined during ticket distribution in 2019 in constituencies that they had held for various terms.

However, Fadnavis also had to pay the cost of burning bridges with the old guard of the Maharashtra BJP shortly after cutting them to size.

In 2019, the party not only performed worse than expected, but Fadnavis also faced the humiliation of not being able to form a government despite emerging as the largest party and leading the winning pre-election alliance. Leaders like Khadse and Mungatiwar, who had cultivated lifelong ties with Shiv Sena, could have saved the alliance. Khadse himself pointed out that things were not beyond repair with Shiv Sena and that the BJP could have easily retained power.

“If we had gone back a couple of steps and had proper talks with the Sena, the saffron alliance would have retained the government because the mandate was for the BJP-Sena to rule,” he had said in a veiled mockery of Fadnavis after Sena broke the decades-long alliance with NDA and joined hands with archenemies NCP and Congress.

But finally, when Fadnavis put all his strength into securing a second term, he received no help from party leaders who might have mediated the Seine, or from party rebels who won the elections as independents. The central leadership, with whom it enjoyed close relations, remained aloof and did not attempt to negotiate a deal in Maharashtra as it did in Haryana.

With PTI inputs