Mumbai: In 2014, Prakash Mehta, a senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA who has been instrumental in building the party’s base among Mumbai’s Gujarati population, stood out as one of the few experienced faces in Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis-led state cabinet.
Five years later, as the government nears the end of its term, the same MLA has now earned the dubious distinction in political circles of being only the second minister to resign due to corruption charges, though Fadnavis has officially denied this as the reason for dropping Mehta.
The first one was Eknath Khadse, the senior-most member in the cabinet, who resigned from his post in 2016 following graft allegations.
On Sunday, Mehta was one of the six ministers Fadnavis dropped in his second and final cabinet reshuffle three months before Maharashtra goes to polls.
Mehta’s resignation came a day before the beginning of the last legislative session of the Fadnavis government. The opposition was planning to aggressively target the BJP-led government over graft allegations surrounding Mehta and wanted to push for the minister’s resignation close on the heels of the state polls.
Mehta, who held the housing portfolio, had been under opposition fire since 2017 for allegations of illegally allocating additional building rights to a developer in a slum redevelopment project, going against the official advice of civil servants and saying the decision was being taken with the CM’s knowledge. An irate Fadnavis is said to have reversed Mehta’s decision at the eleventh hour.
The Lokayukta, which probed the allegations, has submitted a report to the state government, reportedly passing strictures against Mehta. The Maharashtra government is expected to table an ‘action taken report’ on the Lokayukta’s findings in this legislative session.
Even as Mehta’s ouster comes just three months before the assembly elections, the leader had been courting controversies since almost the beginning of his term as cabinet minister in 2014, and had gradually fallen out of favour with CM Fadnavis, multiple party sources said.
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Controversies
In his early days as housing minister, Mehta was famously known to not get along with the civil servant in charge of the department, Satish Gavai, who was ultimately transferred to the water resources department.
Mehta had made public comments about how the government does not need civil servants, work such as preparing and presenting cabinet notes should be done by ministers instead of secretaries, and that he had not met his secretary even once since taking over the housing portfolio.
An official earlier with the state housing department said Mehta had allowed his son to sit in on official meetings a couple of times, ruffling feathers with a few department officials and was known to sit on files.
“The CM often expressed his displeasure as decision-making was very slow, files were not cleared promptly and so on,” said the official who didn’t wish to be named.
Even BJP’s ally Shiv Sena, a part of the Fadnavis-led government, had started targeting Mehta over all his controversies. Closer to the 2017 Mumbai civic election, which the two allies fought separately, the Shiv Sena put up a poster in Ghatkopar calling Mehta, “Majlela Boka” — a pompous tomcat — illustrating it with the MLA’s face on a cat’s body.
Besides the case probed by the Lokayukta, Mehta was also under opposition attack for other alleged irregularities. He was accused of using his discretionary powers as a minister to overturn a 2012 government decision and allot a plot owned by the state housing agency to a private developer. The opposition also alleged that Mehta falsely showed his son and other relatives as tenants on a Ghatkopar plot to make them beneficiaries in a redevelopment scheme. Fadnavis then defended Mehta on the floor of the House.
However, even as Mehta stayed on in the cabinet, he was slowly stripped off of some of his duties. In 2016, Fadnavis took away the labour portfolio from Mehta, reallocating it, and in 2018 displaced the leader from the post of the Raigad district guardian minister. The CM had also started keeping a closer eye on key housing projects such as Dharavi redevelopment.
The face of Mumbai’s Gujarati community
Mehta, now a six-time MLA from Ghatkopar, a Gujarati-dominated constituency in Mumbai, originally hails from Gujarat’s Saurashtra region and was committed to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) since childhood. He actively participated in the Jai Prakash Narayan-led agitation in 1975 and joined the Janata Party in 1977.
The leader joined the BJP in 1980, and worked his way up the political ladder in the party — from being president of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha’s (BJYM) Ghatkopar unit, to becoming BJYM’s Mumbai president, to heading the party’s North East district in Mumbai to ultimately being the BJP Mumbai president.
Mehta was first elected to the Ghatkopar legislative constituency in 1990 and has steadily held on to the seat for six terms, becoming a household name in the area and a strong political face from Mumbai’s Gujarati community.
Gradually establishing himself as a local player in Mumbai’s construction industry, he was also part of the Shiv Sena-BJP cabinet of 1995, looking after portfolios such as labour, housing, slum redevelopment, urban land ceiling, consumer protection, tourism, state excise and so on.
Fadnavis initially picked Mehta for the industries portfolio, but the leader was soon shifted to housing, given his experience in the construction sector. When Mehta was inducted in the cabinet, the move was widely seen as one to accommodate a Gujarati face in the state cabinet and appease the community in Mumbai.
When things started going south for Mehta, it was this very reputation of being a strong Gujarati leader in Mumbai that is said to have shielded him — until now.