Vilasrao’s Dead End

Former chief minister of Maharashtra Vilasrao Deshmukh now has a Supreme Court censure and CAG report to live down. But will this finally spell the end of his political run?

This February, there was a strong buzz in Maharashtra’s political circles that former Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, currently India’s Minister for Science and Technology, was all set to return to the state as CM. The news caused much confusion. Marathi news channels spent valuable air time debating a possible leadership change in the state. For nearly a week, word of Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan’s presumed exit kept Mumbai’s gossip mongers busy. Sensing opportunity, all Congress aspirants to the top post made a beeline for Party President Sonia Gandhi’s darbar.

They discovered it was just a rumour, like several before it, that had its origin in the Deshmukh camp. Lending the mills added grist this time round, however, was the Congress’ rout in recent elections to civic bodies, municipalities and zila parishads in the state. It has given Deshmukh’s supporters another reason to demand his reinstatement (he was ousted after Mumbai’s 26/11 attacks). In the past, they have held up just about anything they could find—from floods, drought and group clashes to a rising crime rate and even bad roads—to blow trumpets for the ex-CM’s return. What they ignore, though, is that it is the entire Congress that is in trouble in Maharashtra, and much of it is Deshmukh’s doing.

If anything, Deshmukh has been granted far too many chances by the High Command. And the former CM will find it hard to whistle his way through the latest mess he is in. The Supreme Court has censured him for bending rules as CM to grant his close friend and filmmaker Subhash Ghai prime land in the state-held Film City at a throwaway price. Deshmukh has also been rebuked in a new report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) for doling out largesse to the Manjara Charitable Trust founded by him.

Yet, Deshmukh clings to a fond belief, expressed in recent media interactions, that his is “the most saleable face” in Maharashtra.

The facts suggest he is deluding himself. About eight years ago, as CM, Deshmukh granted 20 acres of land to Ghai to set up Whistling Woods, a film institute. On 4 April, the Supreme Court dismissed Ghai’s plea against the order of the Bombay High Court scrapping that allotment. The SC bench of Justices HL Dattu and CK Prasad specifically pulled up Deshmukh for his action, pointing to ‘a lack of transparency in the allotment’ and highlighting the fact that the project’s clearance had been withheld by three CMs before him. ‘The state government gave away the land to its blue-eyed boy for a paltry sum of money. One cannot be treated as a blue-eyed boy for which the Chief Minister can bend or bypass rules to give away land of the state,’ ruled the bench.

Ghai, who has reportedly invested over Rs 50 crore in Whistling Woods, must shut his institute down and return the land, which had been artificially valued at only Rs 3 crore even though an official valuation had pegged its worth at Rs 66 crore. The filmmaker had pulled it off by having his production company Mukta Arts form a joint venture with the Maharashtra Film, Stage, Cultural Development Corporation in 2000. This, reportedly, was done without any formal resolution adopted by the corporation’s board of directors.

Deshmukh’s tryst with cinema started early in his three-decade career, as head of the state’s cultural affairs department. In the past decade, say sources, his son Ritiesh’s ambitions as a filmstar encouraged the ex-CM to forge a closer symbiotic relationship with key players in Bollywood such as Ghai. In fact, it was Ghai who introduced Ritiesh to his friend and South Indian filmmaker K Vijaya Bhaskar, who took the greenhorn on for his 2003 film Tujhe Meri Kasam. Deshmukh was CM at the time. It bombed at the box office, but Ritiesh still got a nomination in 2004 as the ‘most promising newcomer’ at the annual Screen Awards.

It is well known that Ritiesh’s cinema ‘success’ has been closely correlated with his father’s political clout. From 2004 to 2008, while Deshmukh was CM, his actor son was nominated for awards every single year. He even won as many as five awards in various categories during this period.

The far more dubious awards, however, are the ones Deshmukh made in terms of land allotments. According to the CAG Report, the Manjara Charitable Trust was allotted 23,840 sq metres of land in 2006 at Malvani, near Borivali, a northern suburb of Mumbai, to set up a dental college. The report says that the land was left unused for four years, and the trust applied only in 2010 for use of the plot for educational purposes. Since there was no clarity on the time period for which the land was allotted, the suburban district collector could not terminate the agreement, resulting in a loss of revenue to the government. The trust retained the land by paying a mere Rs 6.56 crore against its estimated market price of Rs 30.56 crore.

The figures are stark, but the Congress High Command does not seem to have taken note. This may explain why the Deshmukh camp is unchastened. “These are all temporary setbacks for Vilasraoji,” says an aide of his, “He is the only mass leader who can lead the Congress in Maharashtra.”

Deshmukh’s followers seem to have judged the stench of the Adarsh Cooperative Housing scandal as temporary too. In this scam, army land earmarked for a housing project for war widows was usurped by top politicians, bureaucrats and top army officers. The ex-CM’s role in this is under investigation. Then there is another case involving his friend and Congress MLA Dilipkumar Sananda, a moneylender in the state’s Vidharba region infamous for farmer suicides. After a 2006-07 crackdown on illegal moneylending, the Vidharba police had initiated a probe against Sananda and his father, also a moneylender. But diary entries made by the region’s Superintendent of Police have revealed that the Chief Minister’s Office (with Deshmukh as CM) was trying to scuttle the investigation. The case went to the High Court, which fined the Maharashtra Government Rs 10 lakh for its interference in the probe (the case is still under trial, by the way).

Deshmukh’s hometown of Latur, in the Marathawada belt, has not been free of scandals either. Under him as CM, the state government twisted the rulebook to allot 200,000 sq metres of land under the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corp (MIDC) to the Vilasrao Deshmukh Foundation Trust. In 2010, the High Court admitted a petition filed against this allotment by one Rajendra Lakshman Sontakke, and the case is in its final stages right now (the next hearing is on 23 April).

This case is yet to catch public attention, but high-profile cases such as Adarsh and Sananda’s, which have hurt the Congress’ reputation in the state, ought to have been enough to get Deshmukh labelled a liability by the party. No such luck. He remains a member of the Cabinet at the Centre, though his portfolio has been changed thrice: he held Heavy Industries, then Rural Development and now has charge of Science and Technology.

Deshmukh’s calim to the state’s leadership, as his supporters see it, rests on the so-called TINA factor: ‘There Is No Alternative’. The only other heavyweight contender for the top job in Maharashtra is Sushilkumar Shinde, his close friend and Central Cabinet colleague. But Shinde is said to be keen on becoming India’s Vice President this year. This suits them both.

Few Congressmen understand the state’s politics better than Deshmukh, say his acolytes. Moreover, caste calculations favour him. He belongs to the powerful Maratha lobby. This has a bearing on the coalition dynamics between the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), which govern Maharashtra in an uneasy alliance and have been fighting for political space at each other’s expense. Since NCP Chief Sharad Pawar, who is also Union Agriculture Minister, is a Maratha leader, the Congress High Command has been looking to Deshmukh as a counterweight to keep the NCP’s expansion in check.

Remember, when Deshmukh first lost his job as CM back in 2003, it was said to be because the High Command felt he was proving ineffective in containing the NCP. His casual handling of such issues had resulted in a revolt among Maharashtra MLAs of the party, who demanded a change in leadership. The Congress replaced Deshmukh with Sushilkumar Shinde, who led the party to substantial gains in the 2004 Assembly polls, but soon found himself edged out to make way for Deshmukh again.

Then came the Mumbai terror attacks of 26/11, and Deshmukh goofed up by taking his son Riteish and filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma (in whose films Ritiesh has starred) to visit the Taj Mahal Hotel site within hours of the terror attack. This, coming soon after his home minister RR Patil’s “Bade bade shehron mein chhoti chhoti baatein” gaffe, proved too much for him to shrug off. Under heavy criticism of his conduct, Deshmukh was replaced by Ashok Chavan after that.

The ex-CM was rehabilitated at the Centre later, inducted in the Cabinet after the 2009 Lok Sabha polls as Union Minister for Heavy Industries. What’s more, he was also granted a Rajya Sabha seat by the Congress. According to party sources, had it not been for his closeness to Sonia Gandhi’s political secretary Ahmed Patel, he would have lost favour a long time ago.

So, where does the Congress in Maharashtra go from here? Current CM Prithiviraj Chavan (who took over after Adarsh) retains his reputation as an upright leader, though his years away from state-level politics are a handicap in getting a grip of the local unit. Votebank considerations and party undercurrents continue to baffle him, say some.

A possible contender for his post may have been Narayan Rane, the state’s minister for industry. But he is a Shiv Sainik turned Congressman, and his aggressive brand of politics has put many off. Sources say that the party’s top leadership just does not trust him.

Time is ticking away for the 2014 Assembly polls, by which time observers reckon the Congress would need to have a surer success in the saddle as a leader. Whether Prithviraj Chavan can be that leader, or it would need to be someone else, remains an open question.

About The Author

Haima Deshpande