The electoral sweetness of bank & sugar co-ops

The Ahmednagar district co-operative bank boasted of ~6,902 crore deposits in 2018-19, posting a net profit of ~37 crore. It claimed that it returned much of this as 9 per cent dividend to its member farmer co-operatives, making it one of the more efficient of its ilk in the entire state.

Outside the bank’s boardroom — the hall occupies much of the third floor of a glass façade building in the heart of Ahmednagar city — is the memorial plaque with names of its past ‘chairmen’ and ‘vice-chairmen’.

The list reads like the who’s who of Maharashtra politics, mostly Congressmen, but also some who crossed over to the Nationalist Congress Party in the last two decades, and now to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). “The success of the bank, unlike failure of half a dozen others on the brink of collapse, is that its board of directors leaves its political affiliations behind when it enters the boardroom,” said a senior bank official.

This, the official said, has saved the bank, which was founded in 1958, from arbitrary decision-making in approving loans, and kept liabilities to a minimum. However, the rules of the game have changed of late.

Survival, as evident from the chequered political trajectory of some of the names on the list, is the name of the game. Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil’s is a familiar contemporary name on the plaque. His grandfather Vithalrao Vikhe Patil founded the first sugar co-operative of Asia in Pravara in 1948.

As locals remember, Vithalrao, who had studied only till class four, persuaded economist Dhananjay Ramchandra Gadgil to head the co-operative. When the economist dithered, Vithalrao got 300-400 farmers to travel to Pune, a distance of 120 km, to do a dharna outside his home. If Vithalrao stayed away from electoral politics, and at least initially tried to make his institutions non-dynastic, it did not last long. His son Balasaheb Vikhe Patil joined the co-operative, also headed the bank and became a well-known name in state politics.

Balasaheb quit the Congress to join the