Mumbai: Sometime in 2015, a senior BJP functionary in Maharashtra found himself in a tight spot when a journalist questioned him about a picture of him posing next to a relative of a local gangster.
“There was a crowd of karyakartas (party workers) at that particular event and I didn’t know half the people I was posing with,” the minister recalled, while speaking to ThePrint. “I immediately called a party worker who I knew and made enquiries. It turned out that the person in question had photos with every major Maharashtra politician.”
The BJP minister said he sent all the pictures to the journalist saying, “if you publish my picture, publish the rest of these too”.
That’s where the matter ended. But what may have been an isolated incident then, has over the years become a popular form of political warfare in Maharashtra.
All parties do it, even as politicians from across parties condemn this “politics of photos”, as Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) leader and Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Raut described it earlier this month.
Raut was responding to the row that broke out between his party and the BJP over a picture that had gone viral. That photograph, which came amid the controversy surrounding Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis’s wife Amruta’s FIR against bookie Anil Jaisinghani’s daughter Aniksha, showed Jaisinghani and his son Akshan greeting Shiv Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray.
The photo neither had a date, nor any context, but it heavily implied the Thackerays’ association with the Jaisinghanis, leading to allegations that the bookie had joined the Thackeray-led Shiv Sena.
The Shiv Sena (UBT) did not explicitly deny these allegations, but in response, party spokesperson Sushma Andhare released a photo of Amruta Fadnavis with 1993 blasts convict Sameer Hingora’s son Danish Hingora on Twitter.
Alongside, she wrote: “Those who are showing anyone’s photo with anyone and peddling scripted stories should see this photograph properly and give their reactions accordingly.”
Politicians that ThePrint spoke to also admitted that this trend of “photo warfare” has made being in public life a tad bit more stressful, causing some leaders to be extra cautious. Manisha Kayande, Shiv Sena (UBT) Member of Legislative Council, said it was the BJP “that started all of this by using its IT cell to do all sorts of propaganda ahead of the 2014 elections”.
“Eventually, it came back to bite its own party leaders too,” she said.
Also Read: ‘Sympathy for Rahul will go down if he insults Savarkar’ — Uddhav Shiv Sena hits out at ally
‘Wary of taking pictures now, smartphone biggest enemy’
In 2015, a photograph of Fadnavis, who was then CM, with his wife Amruta and daughter Divija lounging on a yacht was circulated on social media. The photograph was supposedly from an earlier trip, but the senders tried to pass it off as being from a recent visit of Fadnavis to the United States in his official capacity.
The CM office had issued a prompt denial, and the Mumbai Police, based on the complaint of a BJP member, registered an FIR against one Ajay Haptewar, a Congress activist based in Nagpur.
In 2016, a photo of Fadnavis, who was then CM and held the home portfolio, with one Pune-based Baba Bodke, who has multiple cases against him including those of alleged murder against him, kicked up a storm.
As the Opposition targeted Fadnavis, asking how a criminal could have access to his official bungalow, the chief minister’s office said Fadnavis wasn’t aware of the background of the person in the picture.
BJP minister Sudhir Mungantiwar told ThePrint it’s unfair to target any one party, adding that smartphones and social media have changed the ways of politics. He had just come out of a two-minute photo session in his Vidhan Bhavan cabin with at least 15 people who had come to meet him and take a picture while giving a memorandum.
“This is just one of the hundreds of pictures we have to take with people every week, and it is impossible to vet the backgrounds of everyone,” Mungantiwar, Maharashtra’s minister for forests, cultural affairs, and fisheries, said. “If we refuse requests for pictures, we will be labelled as arrogant.”
Congress leader Anant Gadgil said this trend of attacking each other with old photographs and drawing inferences is just “another symptom of the deteriorating level of politics in Maharashtra”.
Gadgil is so wary of this brand of politics that he has installed glass doors in all his meeting rooms at his Pune residence so that even as conversations can be private, there is transparency on who he meets and what transpires.
A woman MLA who didn’t want to be named or identified by her party said she’s now cautious about taking pictures with members of the public. “There are times when someone recognises me at a railway station or a marketplace and requests a selfie. With everything that’s been happening, I am now cautious about agreeing to such requests. It comes at the cost of disappointing people, but it can’t be helped,” she told ThePrint.
‘The politics of photos’
All political parties have either been proponents or victims, or both, of this trend.
In July 2022, days after Eknath Shinde was sworn in as Maharashtra CM, a photograph of him presenting a bouquet to Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar at the latter’s residence went viral. The development came days after a rebellion led by Shinde toppled the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) — a coalition of the Shiv Sena, NCP, and the Congress.
At a time of ample uncertainty among MLAs of the Shinde camp who had walked out of the MVA largely because of differences with the NCP, the picture was damaging.
It forced Shinde to clarify that there was no such meeting and the photo was from November 2021.
Similarly, in 2021, amid the slugfest between NCP’s Nawab Malik and BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis over the Cordelia drug bust and actor Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan’s arrest, Malik had tweeted a picture of Amruta Fadnavis with an alleged drug peddler, Jaydeep Rana. With the picture, Malik said: “Chalo aaj BJP our drug peddler ke rishte pe charcha karte hain.” (Come, let us talk about the relations between BJP and a drug peddler today.)
Amruta had said the man in question had been invited by River March NGO to their event.
The same year, BJP members and supporters had used an old photo of Aaditya Thackeray on an Urdu billboard without context to allege that he was appeasing Muslims and bidding adieu to the Marathi asmita (pride) that his party has traditionally stood for.
The billboard was from 2019 when the junior Thackeray had filed his nomination papers for the assembly polls from the Worli constituency. It was part of a campaign where the leader was appealing to different communities with there being a similar one in Marathi, Hindi, and Gujarati too.
Speaking to ThePrint, NCP MLA Jitendra Awhad said smartphones and their use in politics have made it difficult for politicians to even have a personal life.
“I could be meeting my old classmate for dinner. But, someone could take a picture of us coming out of a restaurant, put it up on social media in a different context and the damage is done,” Awhad, a former minister in the Maha Vikas Aghadi government, said.
“Smartphones have become our biggest enemies in public life. But, it has not changed me as a politician. I have always been bold and open in my public life and will continue being so,” he added.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
Also Read: ‘No digs at family,’ ‘need to study issue’ — why Opposition is keeping mum on Fadnavis FIR issue