It’s ‘never a full stop’ for Sharad Pawar

Advertising blitz by NCP on his birthday suggests an agenda.

Amidst continuing uncertainty in Congress on the leadership question and dithering by Rahul Gandhi, speculation has been triggered if octogenarian Sharad Pawar will emerge as the face of the Opposition and inherit the mantle of leadership of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) from Sonia Gandhi. Half-page advertisements were inserted in certain newspapers on Pawar’s 80thbirthday on 12 December by his Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) colleague Praful Patel, which lamented that due to machinations of “Delhi Durbar”, Pawar had been denied his due (read: Prime Ministerhip) in 1991 and 1996. “He never got the free hand in Congress that he deserved”, wrote Patel, who claimed to be an eyewitness to the events in New Delhi for the past three decades.

Side by side with Patel’s assertion on Pawar came the curtain raiser on a book authored by Pranab Mukherjee prior to his death, in which he has commented on the slide in the fortunes of Congress under Sonia Gandhi. This book,the Presidential Years, is apparently the fourth in the series of Mukherjee’s autobiography. Abhijeet Mukherjee, who succeeded his father as the MP from Jangipur in 2012, tried to restrain the publishers by tweeting his disapproval. It invited a counter tweet from his sister, Sharmishtha, a spokesperson of Congress, who said that Mukherjee had finalised and approved the draft prior to his death. Sharmishtha was chosen by the late Rashtrapati as the custodian of a diary he maintained of his day-today thoughts, whose contents are unpublished and the prerogative of deciding on its publication has been bequeathed to the daughter by the father. Like the diary of Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, which was prised open under court orders 30 years after his death in 1988, the Pranab Mukherjee papers too seem to be heading for a cliff-hanger. Azad’s comments on Nehru and Patel triggered a gale. Mukherjee’s observations on Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Manmohan Singh have become subject of apprehension in Congress circles.

Praful Patel made his debut as MP in the Capital in 1991. Those days Suresh Kalmadi was the known factotum of Sharad Pawar. The bid to make Pawar Prime Minister in 1991 was masterminded by Kalmadi, who mustered an impressive line-up of young MPS and partymen. (Pawar has acknowledged this in his 2016 autobiography, On my terms). However, when it was known that Sonia Gandhi, though officially not in politics after her husband’s brutal assassination, was sending messages to partymen to back P.V. Narasimha Rao, Pawar chose to back out. Many young partymen were looked down upon in the initial days of the Rao tenure due to their backing to Pawar in 1991.

In 1996, when Congress lost power, Pawar became the leader of the party in Lok Sabha and thus should have been the candidate for PM had Congress staked claim—instead, as stated in Patel’s soulful narrative, support was extended to H.D. Devegowda (“Delhi Durbar” at play again). In 1998, after Sonia Gandhi became Congress president at the suggestion of Pranab Mukherjee, party Constitution was amended and she, though not an MP, was made the chairperson of the parliamentary party. Thus Pawar ceased to be an elected leader of the party in Lok Sabha—instead he and Manmohan Singh were nominated as leaders of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, respectively, by Sonia Gandhi. Hence, when the Vajpayee government fell in 1999, claiming “we have 272 and more are coming” Sonia Gandhi had put forward her floundered bid for prime ministership. (Incidentally, the most viewed TV clip during that period was that of Narendra Modi, then a BJP general secretary, mimicking Sonia Gandhi’s claim of “272”).

Sharad Pawar has had a chequered relationship with the Nehru-gandhi family. As a young legislator in Maharashtra, who had been promoted by Y.B. Chavan, Pawar, who came from a leftist background (his family was with the Peasants & Workers Party) became part of the Socialist Forum and backed the Young Turks. In 1972, when Chandrashekhar defied Indira Gandhi and got elected to the Congress Parliamentary Board in Shimla, Pawar was one of his backers. In 1978, he broke away and formed Samanantar Congress (parallel Congress) and became Chief Minister of Maharashtra with the help of Socialists. Returning to power in 1980, Indira Gandhi invited Pawar back into Congress fold, but he preferred to stay away and went on to head the “other” Congress—congress(s), which he merged with Congress(i) at a rally in Aurangabad in December 1986 as he felt comfortable working with Rajiv Gandhi. He became CM of Maharashtra in the Rajiv regime. In his autobiography, Pawar records that in 1989 he had thwarted a bid engineered by Rajiv Gandhi to topple his government in Mumbai. (It was in this background that in 1991 Sonia Gandhi had thrown her weight behind Narasimha Rao). In 1999, Pawar floated the NCP after he was expelled from Congress for having supported P.A. Sangma’s stand that Sonia Gandhi “having been born outside India” could be a bone of contention before the electorate. However, a few months later NCP did align with Congress and form a government in Maharashtra. Pawar’s autobiography mentions Praful Patel’s role in this exercise. In 2001, after Kalmadi and Pawar had parted ways, Patel organised a grand show for Pawar’s 61st birthday. Thus the highpowered advertising blitz on 12 December when Pawar turned 80 is significant.

Given the chequered relationship Pawar has had with the Nehru-gandhi family and his comment on 5 December describing Rahul Gandhi as being “inconsistent”, him emerging as Sonia’s successor in UPA is debatable. However, a large number of parties opposed to BJP, who are not averse to a working arrangement with Congress, may be inclined to accept octogenarian Pawar as the face of the Opposition to the current dispensation. In his autobiography, Pawar states that in life there can be a comma, or may be a semi-colon, but “never a full stop”. Despite ill health, Pawar spends long hours on political work—hence, Praful Patel’s gesture on his birthday may not be sans an agenda.