Athawale, always an enfant terrible

Ramdas Athawale was always the enfant terrible of Maharashtra politics. As a rising young Turk, at the height of the agitation to rename the Marathwada University after Babasaheb Ambedkar, he was among the worst kind of rabble-rousers and street fighters – the militant Shiv Sainiks that we were familiar with were not a patch on him and his fellow agitators.

Ramdas Athawale was always the enfant terrible of Maharashtra politics. As a rising young Turk, at the height of the agitation to rename the Marathwada University after Babasaheb Ambedkar, he was among the worst kind of rabble-rousers and street fighters – the militant Shiv Sainiks that we were familiar with were not a patch on him and his fellow agitators.

RPI (A) chief and minister of state for social justice and empowerment Ramdas Athawale. (Praful Gangurde)

His speeches were always rousing and provocative, and he was like a magnet to many Dalit youth of the time, though never in the intellectual class of a Prakash Ambedkar, Jogendra Kawade, or RS Gavai who, as equally good speakers, impressed the non-Dalit voting population enough to have succeeded in electing themselves to the Lok Sabha from general constituencies in Maharashtra in 1998.

Sharad Pawar, who had managed that social engineering, chose to run Athawale, whom he had previously taken under his wing and made a minister for social welfare in his cabinet to get him off the streets and cease being a thorn in his government’s side, ran him from a reserved seat for he knew none except Athawale’s core supporters would be convinced of his suitability for member of Parliament.

Athawale by then, however, had lost much credibility with his own people, as was obvious from the manner he was stoned and chased out of Ramabai Ambedkarnagar in 1997, and had to scrape through a barbed wire fence to escape their bricks and bats. For, with one stint as minister, he had turned cushy and ambitious, solely vying for a berth in a cabinet again. Pawar’s backing and an alliance with the Congress helped him win every time he contested the Lok Sabha but he was deeply disappointed when, through the UPA years, neither Pawar nor the Congress could accommodate him in their government.

Pawar shed his baggage in 2009 when he failed to find Athawale a seat to contest from on the NCP quota but the Congress obligingly handed him a ticket from the newly-reserved seat of Shirdi. By now though, he really had no takers.

In conversation with him and some of his supporters on and off, I realised it was the perks of office that mattered to him more than a parliamentary seat per se.

“Don’t you want to take my photo? Aren’t you going to publish my pictures in your newspaper?” he once asked me when I went to speak to him about the Dalit position on the cow slaughter bill first raised by the Shiv Sena-BJP government in 1996 in Maharashtra.

“You already are very famous and we have plenty of your pictures on file,” I replied, a little surprised. His vanity, however, was confirmed when one of his supporters chased after me as I was leaving and said Athawale had some freshly-taken pictures sitting and swinging on a jhoola, and it would be nice if we could use those pictures rather than ordinary mugshots with the story.

It may not be very flattering to say this, but after he had swung to the Shiv Sena in search of a parliament ticket, one from among his group of fast-depleting supporters once told me that, that all that Athawale wanted now was an office of member of Parliament – for things like signing on requests like gas cylinders, landline telephones, etc., before much of these MP quotas became redundant with changing laws in the country.

“Last time he got used to the crowds that milled around his office because he came at a smaller price than other MPs. But he made up in terms of economies of scale as people far preferred his easy-come-easy-go style and there were no strings attached to his sanctions, unlike with other MPs,” the supporter said at the time.

That was as damning an indictment as any of Athawale’s commitment to self and perks as is his most recent unthinking statement that he is unaffected by rising fuel prices because as an MP he gets all his petrol for free. Yes, of course, Mr Athawale. But that ‘free’ comes out of our pockets – hard-earned tax-payers money that we sweat and slog for, in the heat and dust.

Also, I wonder how well has Athawale been influenced by the party he cohorts with that he now calls for a 25% reservation for upper castes in government jobs. Dalits are already eyeing Marathas suspiciously for making a similar demand. Now they must look at Athawale with double suspicion. Has he lost his sensitivity to the less-privileged completely?