Jalna: On Saturday, Chhagan Bhujbal, a minister in the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government, made a startling revelation of having repeatedly offered to resign from the cabinet.
Although Bhujbal added that his request was turned down by Chief Minister Shinde and the two Deputy CMs — Devendra Fadnavis and Ajit Pawar — his statement made at a rally of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district showed just how deep the fissures are within the ruling party over granting reservation to Marathas who can produce records of being Kunbi (an OBC caste) through the OBC quota.
Bhujbal — once an aggressive leader who had grown tepid since being embroiled in a graft case and being arrested for it — is tapping into his pre-arrest aggression, flexing his muscle as an OBC leader.
In November, when Bhujbal, wearing a white kurta pajama with a characteristic scarf draped around his neck, had walked towards the microphone at a mega rally of OBCs in Jalna, a song specially recorded for him started playing in the background.
The lyrics of the song go — “Bhujbal, Bhujbal, Shahu, Phule, Bhimraovancha karyacha vadal, shabda phulane, kartutvane, ladhte ahe vadal.”
The song translates to how Bhujbal is the fragrance of the legacies of Rajarshi Shahu Maharaj, Mahatma Jyotirao Phule and Dr BR Ambedkar. It further says he is fighting like a storm with his work and gentle (flower-like) words.
Bhujbal’s speech that day — standing up for the rights of the OBCs and lashing out at Maratha leader Manoj Jarange-Patil — was anything but gentle.
The OBCs of Jalna — the same district from where Jarange-Patil comes — hailed Bhujbal as their hero, even as the Marathas were riled up. At various places across the state, Maratha organisations burnt Bhujbal’s effigies.
But Bhujbal, a leader from the Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), didn’t seem to care.
The Yeola MLA was looking to reclaim his identity as an aggressive OBC leader after years of being muted while fighting corruption cases and serving jail time. His speech at the Jalna OBC rally helped serve this exact purpose.
“The stand that Chhagan Bhujbal has taken now is not surprising or unexpected. This is the same leader who had walked out on Bal Thackeray because he disagreed with the Shiv Sena’s stand on the Mandal Commission report for OBC reservation,” Nitin Birmal, associate professor at Pune’s Dr Ambedkar College of Arts & Commerce, told ThePrint.
“Looking at his age and career, it is clear that he does not care about getting support from the Marathas. But, if he seizes this opportunity, he can strengthen his identity as an OBC leader, which gives him a lot of bargaining power in coalition politics,” Birmal added.
The 76-year-old Bhujbal has served in multiple Maharashtra cabinets, has been deputy CM on two occasions and an MLA for multiple terms. He is currently representing the Yeola assembly constituency in Nashik, which he has held for four consecutive terms.
As Bhujbal speaks out — passionately furthering the cause of the OBCs and hurting members of the Maratha community — he is also putting his own government in a tough spot, especially Chief Minister Eknath Shinde.
That, too, at a time when Shinde, a Maratha himself, has been bending over backwards to placate the community he comes from and trying his best to concede to its demands without angering the OBCs.
The state witnessed a fresh wave of protests by the Maratha community demanding quotas in government jobs and education in August-September, and then again since last month.
Maratha community leader Jarange–Patil was on an indefinite fast seeking reservation for Marathas as Kunbis, who are considered to be an OBC caste and get reservation under the OBC quota.
Leaders of the Maratha community claim all Marathas have their roots in the agrarian Kunbi clan and should be given reservation in government jobs and education as Kunbis.
A separate quota for Marathas is embroiled in a court battle, with the Supreme Court having struck it down in 2021, calling it “unconstitutional”. The state government has filed a curative petition in this regard.
After Jarange-Patil’s third round of protests last month, the Shinde government issued a draft notification saying all Marathas who can produce documents to claim they are Kunbis, as well as their relations by marriage within the same caste, or by birth, will be eligible for Kunbi caste certificates.
The Ahmednagar rally of the OBCs was in response to draft notification, protesting against the inclusion of Marathas in the OBC quota as Kunbis.
Also Read: Maharashtra’s Maratha quota stir puts Fadnavis in a tight spot, CM Shinde attempts damage control
Shinde government’s OBC face
The current insecurities of the OBC community make for fertile ground for Bhujbal to attempt to fill a void. While different parties have had regional OBC satraps, the community has not had a pan-Maharashtra political leader since the death of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Gopinath Munde in 2014.
And Bhujbal — the star speaker of the OBC rally — acknowledged this void.
In Jalna, he started his speech by talking about how all tall OBC leaders from different parties were present at the rally, but the tallest of all — Munde — was missing.
Many saw Bhujbal’s speech that day as incendiary, as words that served as fuel in an already tense situation.
But back in the villages of Jalna, members of the OBC community strongly believe what Bhujbal said was “just the right amount of aggression.”
“Sometimes, strong words are necessary to bring an entire community to rally together. And what did he say that was so wrong? He only responded to all the verbal attacks and the violence caused by protesters of the Maratha community,” Satsang Mundhe, a local OBC leader from the Congress fold who helped organise the Jalna rally, told ThePrint.
Bhujbal had lashed out at protesters from the Maratha community for violent attacks on the properties of Maratha as well as OBC politicians, and even questioned his own government on why these incidents were not probed.
“We are also hearing reports of documents being forged to show Marathas as Kunbis and make them eligible for reservation as OBCs. At such a time, it helps to have someone from the government on our side,” said Balasaheb Dakhne, a social activist based in Antarwali Sarati, a village in Jalna from where Jarange Patil’s agitation started.
Shinde-Fadnavis-Pawar power dynamics
It is this very hope, the optics that someone from the government is looking out for the OBCs, that has kept at least two of the three ruling parties — the Ajit Pawar-led NCP and the BJP — relatively silent and tolerant to the point of sounding supportive of Bhujbal’s rebellious statements against his own government.
It also helps them serve their own political goals.
Meanwhile, it is only the leaders of the Shinde-led Shiv Sena who can be seen verbosely criticising Bhujbal’s speaking out.
“People should stay away from making different statements. When the government is agreeable to all demands, why create conflict between people?” Deepak Kesarkar, a Shiv Sena minister, told reporters Sunday.
The three parties had unanimously agreed to maintain a common narrative — that the government is committed to granting reservation to the Maratha community and will ensure it doesn’t breach any other community’s quota.
CM Shinde had also personally appealed to all ministers to speak in the same voice after Bhujbal’s first supposed transgression a few days before the Jalna rally, sources from all three parties had said.
At the Jalna rally, Bhujbal had publicly questioned this stand, expressing concern over the rising number of persons from the Maratha community being given Kunbi caste certificates.
Two senior leaders from the Ajit Pawar-led NCP told ThePrint that party leaders discussed Bhujbal’s belligerence and statements that question the government’s stated stand at an internal meeting Wednesday.
“Bhujbal’s stand was just discussed. Nobody said anything for or against it and we moved on to the next issue,” a senior leader from the ruling NCP faction told ThePrint.
Bhujbal has denied having any differences in his party or being sidelined in the party because of his different stand against the government.
“I have not been sidelined. So far, no one in the party has spoken against me. Ajitdada also said that I have all the right to speak for the OBCs, something I have been doing all along,” he said.
It is the power dynamics between the state’s three leaders — CM Shinde and deputy CMs Ajit Pawar and Devendra Fadnavis — and their parties that best explain the reactions of the three ruling parties to Bhujbal’s bellicosity.
Deputy CM Pawar, one of Maharashtra’s most prominent Maratha leaders, has sat out the entire crisis.
In this round of protests, the Marathas have been severely criticising politicians from their own community as having done nothing for them.
The latest protests have helped the other Maratha in the trio to flex his Maratha muscle and build an identity as a Maratha politician. The protests have given Maharashtra CM Shinde an opportunity to come out of the shadows of his two powerful and ambitious deputy chief ministers.
Shinde placated Jarange-Patil in September as well as in November to give up his hunger strike, and promised speedy implementation of finding Kunbi records among Marathas. In the third-phase of Jarange-Patil’s agitation, Shinde once again carefully scripted his image as a victor by issuing the draft notification about giving eligible Marathas and all their relatives reservation through the OBC quota as Kunbis. He reached Jarange-Patil’s rally in Vashi, where both garlanded a statue of Maratha warrior king Chhatrapati Shivaji and addressed the quota activist’s followers from the same stage.
According to political analysts, allowing Bhujbal to carry on unchecked helps the ruling NCP and BJP to whip up more stumbling blocks for Shinde to tackle.
“Ajit Pawar has always worn his Maratha identity on his sleeve. Eknath Shinde is getting a chance to build his Maratha identity through this episode. But, the competition seems to be more between Fadnavis and Shinde. And in this contest, the stand that Bhujbal has taken is turning out to be beneficial for the former,” political commentator Hemant Desai told ThePrint.
Fadnavis, a Brahmin, won the Maratha community’s support in 2018 when he was the chief minister by passing a law to grant the community reservation in government jobs and education. But the deputy CM, who also holds the state home portfolio now, has lost a lot of this political goodwill since.
The quota law he created as CM could not stand the test of the Supreme Court.
And now, the leader is battling criticism from the Opposition as well as from people within the community — first for lathi charging protesters in September, and then for allowing the agitation in October-November to get violent.
In Maharashtra, the BJP draws a lot of its support from the OBCs. Maharashtra BJP president Chandrashekhar Bawankule, an OBC leader himself, reportedly supported Bhujbal’s statements.
“On one side, Eknath Shinde is handling the Marathas, and on the other, Chhagan Bhujbal is placating the OBCs. Staying silent right now works in our favour,” a senior BJP leader told ThePrint.
Also Read: On Shinde turf, Jarange-Patil slams govt for cases against Maratha protesters, Bhujbal’s OBC rallies
The rise of Bhujbal
Bhujbal had humble beginnings — starting as a vegetable vendor in Mumbai’s landmark Crawford Market when he joined the Shiv Sena in the 1960s.
He steadily rose through the party’s ranks with his aggressive style that suited the Shiv Sena’s street politics back then.
Bhujbal — known to be the blue-eyed boy of Bal Thackeray — became a corporator in Mumbai in 1973, the Mumbai mayor in 1985 and subsequently the only Shiv Sena legislator in the Maharashtra assembly.
However, there were two reasons why he fell out with the Shiv Sena and its founder Bal Thackeray.
First, he expressed support for the Mandal Commission’s reservation policy for the OBCs, which the Shiv Sena founder had decided to oppose. Second, the party leadership decided to name senior leader Manohar Joshi, a Brahmin, as the leader of the 52-member legislative group of the party, bypassing Bhujbal.
Bhujbal publicly criticised Joshi’s work as Opposition leader, which irked Thackeray.
In December 1991, the Shiv Sena saw its first major rebellion when Bhujbal walked out of the party with a group of supporters to join the Congress under Sharad Pawar’s leadership.
When Sharad Pawar formed the NCP, Bhujbal followed suit.
Bhujbal had also drawn the ire of Shiv Sena leaders by getting Bal Thackeray arrested in 2000 in connection with his writings regarding the 1992-93 riots. He was the deputy CM and the home minister of the NCP-Congress government then.
His troubles first began in the mid-2000s when his name got embroiled in the Telgi stamp paper scam, resulting in him losing his deputy CM post. The leader was investigated in the case, but was not named in the chargesheet filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
When the Congress-NCP government returned to power in 2004, Bhujbal became the state Public Works Department (PWD) minister and eventually the deputy CM again in 2008.
It was this stint of Bhujbal’s that got him into trouble.
In 2016, when the Fadnavis-led government was in charge, Bhujbal was put behind bars for alleged corruption in the construction of the Maharashtra Sadan building in Delhi, when he was the state PWD minister in the previous Congress-NCP government.
When he got out on bail in 2017, he was a very different Bhujbal.
The usually confident, invincible leader known to wear expensive mufflers as he took on his rivals in the house, was reduced to a frail, weak and largely silent man — which he continued to be for several years after his release.
In 2021, a special court discharged Bhujbal, his son Pankaj, nephew Sameer, and five others in the case.
In July 2023, Bhujbal was among the senior-most leaders to rebel against the Sharad Pawar-led NCP under nephew Ajit Pawar’s leadership to join the Shinde-led government.
Today, Opposition politicians have alleged that, in his quest to take on the Shinde government as an OBC leader, Bhujbal is “reading Fadnavis’ script”.
In his Jalna speech, he almost sought to absolve Fadnavis of the blame for the lathi charge in Jalna — painting a detailed account of how Jarange Patil’s supporters had first attacked the police persons, including women constables.
But, Bhujbal has uncapped his bottled-up aggressive streak. He dismissed the charge in the distinctive self-assertive manner that pre-arrest Bhujbal was known for.
Speaking to reporters after the November rally, he said, “Nobody can give Bhujbal any script. Neither was Pawarsaheb (Sharad Pawar) giving me any script. Nor is Ajit dada (Ajit Pawar) now. Neither is Fadnavis nor Shinde. I have been saying what I’ve been saying for 35 years.”
“My script is the script of Phule, Shahu, Ambedkar. It is the script of the Mandal Aayog and the country’s bahujan samaj,” he added.
छत्रपती-फुले-शाहू-आंबेडकर या महापुरुषांचे विचार आणि बहुजनांचं हित हेच माझं स्क्रिप्ट आहे!#ChhatrapatiShivajiMaharaj #MahatmaPhule #ShahuMaharaj #DrBabasahebAmbedkar #Script #Maharashtra pic.twitter.com/dbgS5VdUPF
— Chhagan Bhujbal (@ChhaganCBhujbal) November 23, 2023
(Edited by Richa Mishra)
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