Mumbai: In 1977, 32-year-old Suresh Kalmadi is said to have hurled footwear at the car of then Prime Minister Morarji Desai at Pune’s Tilak Smarak. For the former air force pilot, who’d served in the 1965 and 1971 wars against Pakistan, this turned out to be a defining moment.
Sanjay Gandhi noticed Kalmadi and introduced him to Rajiv Gandhi, and Kalmadi went on to hold an iron grip over Pune’s politics for the next three decades, also helping the Congress dominate the city.
On Tuesday, former Union Minister Kalmadi died at the age of 81 after prolonged illness.
He who dominated Pune’s politics through the late 1990s and early 2000s, by the time he died, had faded from centrestage.
Much of it was because of allegations of corruption surrounding the 2010 Commonwealth Games. The accusations, for which Kalmadi had to spend ten months behind bars, quickly deflated political power of the veteran sports administrator. With him, Congress’s presence in Pune also declined; the party is now a shadow of its former self in the city.
“During Kalmadi’s heyday in politics, the Congress was strengthened in Pune and dominated political power in the city. He was the main leader of Congress from Pune. After he faded from prominence, there were only political pygmies left who fought among each other and severely damaged the party,” political commentator Hemant Desai told ThePrint.
Today, the Congress doesn’t have a single MP or MLA from Pune. Neither has the party been in power in the Pune civic body since 2007.
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A political career takes flight
Kalmadi voluntarily retired from the Indian Air Force as a squadron leader in early 1970s and acquired the Poona Coffee House with the help of Nilubhau Limaye, a local political heavyweight, as a mediator. Poona Coffee House soon became a hotspot for established and aspiring politicians to gather, talk and exchange ideas.
It was also the site that catapulted Kalmadi’s political career, leaders close to him say.
Kalmadi started his political innings with the Youth Congress. By 1977, the leader became Pune’s Youth Congress president, and in 1978, he took over the same post for Maharashtra.
He was known to be close to veteran politician Sharad Pawar, though they later had a falling out.
In 1977, when Pawar toppled Congress’s Vasantdada Patil government, Kalmadi stuck with Pawar’s faction of the Congress and was rewarded with a Rajya Sabha seat in 1982. This was the first of his four Rajya Sabha terms. He served a total of seven terms as an MP, of which three were from Pune Lok Sabha constituency. He eventually became Union minister of state in charge of Railways under then P.V. Narasimha Rao government in 1995-96.
In a long condolence message on X, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) founder Sharad Pawar said, “Differences of opinion, conflicts and criticism are inevitable in politics; yet, even in such circumstances, Suresh Kalmadi never compromised on democratic values. He consistently upheld the stance throughout his entire career that politics is not merely a means to power, but a responsibility towards people.”
When Sharad Pawar returned to the Congress’s fold in 1986, so did Kalmadi. His political career saw a meteoric rise there on.
It is said that Kalmadi had lobbied for Sharad Pawar to be the prime minister, when the post was given to P.V. Narasimha Rao.
“But, later, when Sitaram Kesri became the All India Congress Committee chief in 1996, Suresh Kalmadi thought that he may not get a nomination to contest parliamentary polls. P.V. Narasimha Rao, whose group was at that time seen as a rival to Sharad Pawar, helped him. That is said to have caused some distance between the two. This was also the time when Ajit Pawar rose in prominence in politics,” Satish Desai, former deputy mayor of Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) and a close aide of Kalmadi, told ThePrint.
Kalmadi started the Pune International Marathon in 1983 and the Pune Festival, a major cultural event coinciding with the Ganesh festival in the city, in 1989.
Since then, the Pune Festival has grown into a star-studded event, with actors, sportspersons, industrialists and other prominent personalities participating in the event. Among frequent performers is actor Hema Malini.
Kalmadi also founded platforms such as the Pune Vyaspeeth, an apolitical forum where civil society members from different fields gather to discuss various aspects of development in Pune.
Hemant Desai said, “Yashwantrao Chavan, the first Chief Minister of Maharashtra, believed in encouraging sports, arts and culture, along with his politics. Kalmadi sort of did the same, but at a much more commercial level. He used sports and art to boost his political power in Pune.”
In the decades when Kalmadi dominated Pune’s politics, there was a popular slogan that would fly during elections–“Sabse bada khiladi, Suresh Kalmadi (The biggest player of all, Suresh Kalmadi).”
He quit the Congress in 1997, and fought the Pune Lok Sabha election in 1998 as an Independent under a banner called ‘Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi’, backed by the Shiv Sena and Bharatiya Janata Party. But after the loss, he soon returned to the party.
“He rose to prominence in the city in a very short time, flying to success like the former pilot that he was. There’s no one who has grown politically in the city in such a short time, barring perhaps BJP’s Murlidhar Mohol in the current age,” Satish Desai said.
Eventually, it was the Pawars of the NCP that halted the Congress’s reign in Pune, wresting the Pune municipal corporation from the party in 2007.
The downfall
As sports administrator, Kalmadi headed the Maharashtra State Athletics Federation, chaired the selection committee of the Athletics Federation of India and became chief of the Indian Olympic Association in 1996. He was re-elected to the post without any opposition in 2004 and 2008.
He was known for bringing the National Games to Pune in 1994 and the Commonwealth Youth Games in 1998.
It was his stint as the head of the organising committee of the Delhi Commonwealth Games in 2010 that brought about his downfall.
Kalmadi, among others, faced allegations of irregularities in awarding and implementing two contracts, causing a loss of Rs 30 crore to the organisation committee. He also battled criticism of inferior quality work and graft in managing the games, and was eventually suspended by the Congress after his arrest in 2011.
At the time, Sharad Pawar would make a snide remark, taunting that the chairperson of the organising committee had tried to hang himself, but the ceiling came down. Maybe the quality of the ceiling was not good, he said.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in 2014 filed a closure report in the case, and the Enforcement Directorate’s closure report came just last year. It said there was no offence made under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) due to “absence of the proceeds of crime” and that no scheduled offence had been committed by the accused.
But Kalmadi’s political career never recovered, and his health started deteriorating.
“It is the job of the Opposition to make allegations. The government that has given them the clean chit is made of the same parties that made the allegations. But the Congress party should not have distanced him so quickly and suspended him,” Satish Desai said, adding that the clean chit gave some closure but it came too late.
Multiple Congress functionaries in Pune had over the years sought Kalmadi’s reinstatement into the party. His family members and party workers were happy about the probe’s conclusions, but Kalmadi was not healthy enough to bask in the glory, Satish Desai said.
“When we heard about the clean chit, some of us tried to meet him. Earlier, he used to sit in the front yard of his house and meet some people, but even that had stopped. One could only meet him through his PA (personal assistant). I had called the PA, but I couldn’t meet him,” the former aide said.
Satish Desai and other Kalmadi loyalists like him finally got an appointment to meet Kalmadi on his birthday on 1 May last year. But there were some limitations — no bouquets and no shaking of hands.
“We spoke to him, but he could only nod his head. We all were happy. But had this clean chit come earlier, it would have given him at least a decade more in politics,” Satish Desai said.
(Edited by Prerna Madan)
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