Munde-Mahajan daughters: Political achievers but have a long way to go to match their dads

Pankaja Gopinath Munde | Facebook | @PankajaGopinathMunde

Both Pankaja and Poonam lack the spark that their fathers — Gopinath Munde and Pramod Mahajan — had, say political analysts.

Mumbai: On 4 June 2014, a distraught Pankaja Munde lit the funeral pyre of her father Gopinath Munde, a senior BJP leader, MP and a key player on Maharashtra’s political stage.

Later, her cousin Poonam Mahajan stood by Pankaja Munde’s side, accepting condolences.

With Mahajan having won her first Lok Sabha elections less than a month ago — in May 2014 — and Munde already being an MLA from Parli, in her family’s home district, the two daughters were seen as the inheritors of the political legacy and mass following of the Munde-Mahajan family.

Four years on, while Munde and Mahajan’s personal political careers have sharply ascended, political watchers say, carrying their fathers’ legacy still remains a tall order for the young women leaders.

“You cannot compare either Poonam Mahajan or Pankaja Munde with the legacy and clout that their fathers had,” political commentator Prakash Bal said.

“They are still young and have to grow more politically, but they lack that spark that their fathers had. Neither of them have the same clout or respect within their parties either,” Bal added.

The Munde-Mahajan parivar

Gopinath Munde, a five-time MLA who was inducted as a Union cabinet minister for the first time a week before he died, was known as the ‘OBC face’ of the BJP, traditionally seen to have an upper caste tilt.

Hailing from Marathwada, Munde was among the most prominent political leaders in Maharashtra not because of his caste, but his organisational skills, political machinations and the ability to cobble up a grand ‘ATM alliance’ (Athavale, Thackeray, Munde) by bringing together the BJP, Shiv Sena, RPI (A) and other smaller parties.

Gopinath Munde and Pramod Mahajan were friends first, relatives later. Mahajan’s sister, Pradnya, was married to Munde.

Mahajan was shot by his brother, Pravin Mahajan, at his Worli residence when he was at the peak of his career and even touted by some as a PM probable.

In 2006, when political watchers had written off the Mahajan side of the family, Munde eased Pramod Mahajan’s daughter Poonam into politics and groomed her to contest the 2009 Maharashtra assembly polls, which she lost.

The same year he passed the mantle of the Parli assembly constituency to his daughter Pankaja who had been doing his groundwork and running his back offices for several years.

The rise of the Munde-Mahajan sisters

Poonam Mahajan, who lost from Mumbai’s Ghatkopar constituency in 2009, attributed her defeat to a Raj Thackeray-led ‘Maharashtra Navnirman Sena wave’ in the city.

File photo of Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha president, Poonam Mahajan | @poonam_mahajan/Twitter

But since the first defeat, her political career has been an exponential graph. Known once as a brash, often arrogant, political novice, Mahajan, who has a diploma in leadership management from Brighton School of Business Management, UK, has steadily networked and found favour with the top BJP leadership.

In 2010, she took over as the national vice-president of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), BJP’s youth wing. In 2013, she became the BJP’s youngest general secretary. In the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, she dislodged Congress’ Priya Dutt from Mumbai’s North Central constituency. Two years ago, Mahajan took over as the BJYM president, a post earlier held by stalwarts such as Shivraj Singh Chouhan, Rajnath Singh, Uma Bharti and even her father Pramod Mahajan.

She has closely worked with Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis to market big-ticket infrastructure projects in Mumbai, and was deputy chairman of a task force for an International Financial Services Centre in the city. In 2016, she earned praise from PM Modi for organising the Global Citizen event in Mumbai in which British soft rock band Coldplay performed.

Pankaja Munde, a business management graduate from New Jersey’s Seaton Hall University, came out of her father’s shadows when she won the 2009 assembly election from Parli in Beed district.

Munde is said to have played an active role in the 2014 Lok Sabha campaign for her father who won the seat. She trumped her estranged brother Dhananjay Munde, now with the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), to retain the Parli assembly constituency in 2014 and also secured a bypoll victory for her sister, Pritam, to take over her father’s place in the Lok Sabha. She is currently a minister in the Devendra Fadnavis-led cabinet and holds the portfolios of rural development and women and child development.

One of Munde’s most significant successes was being able to pull off a massive show of strength on Dussehra in 2017 after a local priest denied permission to hold a rally at Bhagwangad in Ahmednagar district. Bhagwangad, the traditional venue of her father’s Dussehra rallies, is a pilgrimage centre for the Vanjari community to which she belongs. Unfazed, she moved the venue to her home district of Beed and ensured the event was a crowd puller.

A BJP leader said, “The one strong quality that Pankaja has is that she is bold in her speeches. She has been at the centre of many controversies, but has kept her boldness intact.”

‘Bonhomie missing in second generation’

Besides political aides, Pramod Mahajan and Gopinath Munde were very good friends. That bonhomie is missing in the second generation, say political observers. The senior Mahajan and Munde also had excellent relations with BJP’s ally Shiv Sena and are credited with keeping the alliance intact.

A senior Shiv Sena leader said, “We hardly get that feeling with the second generation. Uddhav saheb looks at them like family, but we don’t get the same warmth from them.”

While Poonam Mahajan has strengthened her political profile, some see her as a politician who networks more in the elite circles, working with the likes of actor Amitabh Bachchan and banker Chanda Kochhar, and organising conferences and concerts than spending time with the masses on the ground.

This perception was strengthened when she reportedly made a controversial remark on the tribal farmers’ long march in Maharashtra last year blaming “urban Maoists” for their stir, drawing flak from all quarters.

Munde, on the other hand, is seen as more of a ground leader, but has been a controversy’s child. She was the first minister in the Fadnavis government to face graft charge for alleged irregularities in the purchase of micronutrient chikki for children in anganwadis that popularly came to be known as the ‘chikki scam’.

She was later ticked off by the BJP senior leadership for sparring with CM Fadnavis on Twitter when she lost one of her portfolios during a cabinet reshuffle. A couple of years ago, she drew sharp criticism as a selfie of hers taken while surveying watershed development works in drought-hit Maharashtra went viral.

Munde is locked in a constant tussle with her estranged cousin, NCP’s Dhananjay Munde, who quit the BJP when Gopinath Munde promoted his daughter over him.

Also, even as she tries to portray herself as a strong, independent politician, Pankaja Munde has used emotive appeals with her father’s name in her speeches way too often.

“Poonam Mahajan won in 2014 due to a Modi wave. Pankaja Munde won the assembly election that year campaigning on her father’s name, attracting sympathy votes,” said a Congress leader who did not wish to be named.

“Now, 2019 will be the real test for the two daughters,” he added.