Mumbai: Standing on a dais in a cream-coloured saree, her sweat-beaded forehead adorned with a vermillion teeka, and her hair slightly dishevelled, bearing traces of the yellow flowers that were just showered on her a few minutes ago, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national secretary Pankaja Munde recalled how her political life has always been “stormy”.
“I have been facing conflict ever since Munde saheb (her father, late BJP leader Gopinath Munde) made me a legislator. I gave up all prosperity and came into politics with the sentiment that my father has been alienated. While working with Munde saheb, even I didn’t realise when the small Pankaja learnt so much and grew to become your tai (elder sister). All the credit goes to you,” the former MLA said, addressing a crowd of supporters at Solapur.
Pankaja was addressing a crowd of supporters during her Shiv Shakti Parikrama, an eight-day pilgrimage of Maharashtra’s Shakti Peeths and jyotirlingas which concluded earlier this week.
Pankaja’s mention of a period when her father was allegedly alienated within the party comes at a time when she herself has been suffering a similar fate.
For the former MLA who is said to have been sidelined within the Maharashtra BJP, the Shiv Shakti Parikrama that concluded Monday was an attempt to consolidate her support base and build her individual political capital, analysts say. It is also an attempt to hold on tighter to her father’s legacy at a time when her cousin, Dhananjay Munde, who has also been a political rival and a claimant to former Union minister Gopinath Munde’s mass following, is in definition an ally.
Dhananjay, a Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader who defeated Pankaja in the 2019 assembly polls from the Parli assembly constituency in Beed district, was among the MLAs to rebel against the Sharad Pawar-led NCP under Ajit Pawar’s leadership in July this year. The Ajit Pawar-led faction joined hands with the ruling BJP and Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena in Maharashtra and Dhananjay is now a state cabinet minister.
“The yatra was essentially a show of strength,” political analyst Hemant Desai told ThePrint.
“She majorly covered the districts that are the sugar bowl of Maharashtra from where Gopinath Munde had drawn the most strength. Pankaja Munde is actually in a spot. She is always directly and indirectly trying to show her disenchantment with her party. She does that by bringing up emotional issues related to her father, emphasising that she is Gopinath Munde’s daughter, and the yatra was in line with that thought.”
ThePrint tried to reach Pankaja for a comment through calls and a text message, but her phone was switched off. Her personal assistant too did not respond to ThePrint’s call and WhatsApp message.
Speaking to reporters in Solapur during the yatra, Pankaja had said the intention behind her tour was to meet her followers.
“My karyakartas are giving a thundering response (to the yatra). I am the sahaprabhari (party’s co-in charge) for Madhya Pradesh so for the last two years, I have constantly been in Madhya Pradesh. I haven’t had the chance to tour Maharashtra and karyakartas feel they should meet me,” she said.
ThePrint reached Maharashtra BJP spokesperson Keshav Upadhye via calls. This report will be updated if and when a response is received.
Brand Pankaja
For the entire duration of the Shiv Shakti Parikrama, Pankaja’s Facebook and YouTube pages were dominated by visuals of people showering her with flowers from atop cranes, giving her long, heavy, serpentine garlands, her followers crowding around her for selfies, leaders from different political parties coming to welcome her and a devout Pankaja visiting the various temples along the way.
At one point, she was also seen roasting bhakris (traditional Maharashtrian bread) while sitting on the floor of a tribal household, surrounded by women. At another place, she was found to be doling out spoonfuls of food to her party workers, serving them while they ate.
Everywhere she went, there were banners of her Shiv Shakti yatra with faces of the Munde sisters — Pankaja and MP Pritam — and their father, Gopinath Munde, a leader who actively cultivated a following for the BJP within the OBC community through the 1980s and 1990s. Senior Munde died in 2014.
There were, however, hardly any BJP flags. This yatra was all about Pankaja and her father’s legacy, say political observers.
“A few years ago, she undertook a yatra on behalf of the party. But, this was not a party event. It was in her personal capacity,” said Vijay Deshmukh, BJP MLA from Solapur who met Pankaja when her pilgrimage tour passed through his constituency.
Deshmukh said his office got a message from Pankaja’s team that she will be undertaking a yatra and will be passing through the Solapur district.
“Gopinath Munde saheb has a strong following in the Solapur district. We have all been his karyakartas. It is because of him that leaders like us got election tickets in the first place. So, we thought we should show up for the person who has done so much for us. So, all followers of Munde saheb give her that respect.”
During the course of her yatra, Pankaja crossed districts such as Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (formerly known as Aurangabad), Nashik, Ahmednagar, Pune, Satara, Sangli, Kolhapur, Solapur, Dharashiv (formerly known as Osmanabad), Beed, Hingoli and Parbhani. Wherever she went, she made it a point to meet senior leaders as well as local functionaries from not just the BJP, but even ally parties such as the Shinde-led Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar-led NCP.
Pankaja also met BJP leaders such as state cabinet minister Suresh Khade, party MPs Sujay Vikhe Patil, Dhananjay Mahadik, Udayanraje Bhosale, BJP MLAs such as Devyani Pharande, Seema Hiray, Suresh Dhas, Sachin Kalyanshetti, and Mahesh Landge, among others. She visited the residences of many local leaders, former MLAs and junior party functionaries during her yatra. For instance, at Nashik, she visited the residence of Shankar Wagh, the BJP’s Nashik rural district chief, to pay her condolences for his brother’s death.
Munde’s outreach during the yatra involved going across party lines, meeting leaders belonging to the BJP’s allies as well as opponents. For instance, at Yeola, loyalists of NCP Minister Chhagan Bhujbal welcomed Munde. At Nashik, Munde also visited the residence of Shiv Sena MLC Narendra Darade. At Karmala, she had breakfast at the residence of Rashmi Bagal, a Shiv Sena leader, and at Kolhapur, she visited the residence of Dhairyasheel Mane.
While in Islampur at Sangli, she visited the Rajarambapu Patil Sahakari Sakhar Karkhana, a sugar factory under the leadership of Jayant Patil, an MLA with the Sharad Pawar-faction of the NCP that is part of the opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi, and met several workers from the party there. At Parbhani, she met Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) MP Sanjay Jadhav.
“I went because our family relations go way back. Gopinath ji shared very good relations with my father-in-law,” said Nashik West MLA Seema Hiray who met Pankaja during her yatra.
“Her yatra was mainly to reconnect with her followers. She had taken political sanyas (renounced politics) for the last two months. And she said she doesn’t hold any position in Maharashtra officially, so it is not that she gets to meet people regularly for their work,” said Hiray.
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Gopinath Munde’s legacy
When Pankaja announced plans of a yatra, many in the political circles recalled her father’s Sangharsh Yatra in 1994. The nature and the impact of this yatra, however, was vastly different.
While Pankaja mainly visited temples and reminded people that she is her father’s daughter, Munde took on the then Sharad Pawar-led government in Maharashtra head-on. The following year, the BJP came to power in Maharashtra for the very first time in coalition with the then undivided Shiv Sena, and Munde became the deputy CM and the home minister.
Senior Munde tilled the land for the BJP’s growth in Maharashtra and helped the party go beyond its ‘Brahminical’ tag in the state by cultivating a following in the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). His popularity went beyond the Vanjari community (that he belonged to) and Munde became synonymous with BJP’s OBC support base in Maharashtra.
In 2009, after Munde became Lok Sabha MP from Beed district, he handpicked his eldest daughter, Pankaja, to contest from the Parli assembly constituency in Beed, overlooking nephew Dhananjay’s claims.
The disgruntled nephew quit the party in 2013 to join the Sharad Pawar-led NCP. Pankaja retained her constituency in the 2014 assembly polls too, but was trounced by her cousin in 2019. Meanwhile, Munde’s other daughter, Pritam Munde, took her father’s place in the Lok Sabha, fighting the bypoll after his death and holding on to the seat in 2019.
Since Munde’s death in 2014, the BJP in Maharashtra has especially had a vacuum of prominent OBC faces at the forefront. As Devendra Fadnavis, former chief minister and current deputy CM, a Brahmin by caste, tightened his hold over the BJP, some resentment started to build up among the old guard, some of whom were significant OBC leaders like Eknath Khadse, who eventually quit the BJP and joined the NCP in 2020. The BJP’s appointment of Chandrashekhar Bawankule as state party president was an effort to correct this perception.
Pankaja’s yatra helped her stamp her presence as an OBC leader as it coincided with the freshest round of Maratha protests for reservations. With the Maratha quota struck down by the Supreme Court, members of the Maratha Kunbi caste under Maratha leader Manoj Jarange-Patil are demanding reservation under the OBC quota. And wherever Pankaja went during her yatra, she fielded reporters’ questions on the issue by showing her whole-hearted support to a separate quota for the Maratha community in government jobs and education, but without touching the reservation for OBCs.
“Which group will say give another community reservation from our quota? Nobody will say that. There is no point in doing that and pitting two communities against each other. Maharashtra wants stability, peace,” Pankaja said, speaking to reporters at Dharashiv.
Speaking to ThePrint, Rajeshwari Deshpande, professor at the department of politics and public administration at the Savitribai Phule Pune University, said, “There is no doubt that Pankaja Munde wants her father’s legacy. She needs to keep the caste community card intact. Some researchers have studied the Vanzari caste associations and it appears that all caste communities have been divided across parties. So, she is desperately looking for every possibility to enhance her political career, while operating within several constraints.”
Munde’s supposed disillusionment with the party has been talked about every time she or her sister were overlooked for a position — in 2016, when the then CM Fadnavis stripped her off the water conservation portfolio under which his flagship ‘Jalyukt Shivar’ scheme was constituted, when she did not get a nomination during the MLC elections in 2020 and 2022, or during the cabinet expansion in 2021, when the BJP leadership picked Bhagwat Karad as a junior minister and OBC face over her sister Pritam.
Then in April this year, at a time when opposition parties were alleging misuse of central agencies by the ruling Narendra Modi-led government to politically target them, Pankaja got surprise visitors at her sugar factory in Parli when officials from the Goods and Services Tax reportedly raided the premises for alleged tax evasion.
In July this year, an exasperated Pankaja called for an eleventh-hour press conference at her Mumbai residence and said all questions about her being overlooked should be directed at the party, and while she belongs to the BJP, the party does not belong to her. She also announced a two-month vacation from “this brand of politics”.
Deshpande said, “It generally shows it becomes more difficult for women politicians to wade through roughhouses of politics. There are few women in mainstream politics, and leaders find it easy to sideline them.”
The alleged alienation of Gopinath Munde within the BJP that Pankaja was talking about was a period when fraught by internal party politics, the senior Munde was reportedly rumoured to join the Congress during the second term of the Manmohan Singh-led government. He eventually stayed put in the BJP.
More than a decade later, there are similar rumours doing the rounds about Pankaja though she had clarified in July that she was not leaving the BJP.
But, beyond that, she is keeping her followers guessing on her next political move.
As the Shiv Shakti Parikrama yatra wound up Monday, Pankaja, who will have to most likely arm-wrestle with rival-turned-ally Dhananjay to keep the Parli assembly seat, made one thing clear while speaking to her followers — that she won’t set her sights on her sister Pritam’s Beed Lok Sabha seat. But beyond that, she left them with a cryptic message.
(Edited by Smriti Sinha)
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