Message to Maha BJP leaders: Top brass is watching

Until the last hour of filing of nominations on Friday, power minister Chandrakant Bawankule was not sure whether he or his wife would get the party’s nomination

Until the last hour of filing of nominations on Friday, power minister Chandrakant Bawankule was not sure whether he or his wife would get the party’s nomination from Kamptii constituency in Nagpur, which he represented for the past three terms. His wife, Jyoti, went to file the nominations only to realise the BJP had given AB form to two other local leaders.

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Four other state BJP heavyweights – higher education minister Vinod Tawde, former ministers Eknath Khadse, Prakash Mehta and party chief whip Raj Purohit – were also kept in suspense until the last day, before being dropped unceremoniously from the party’s list of candidates.

While CM Devendra Fadnavis has no love lost for any of these leaders, barring may be Bawankule, (despite him being from the Gadkari camp), the decision to drop them was taken by the party’s central leadership. The subtext behind cutting down each of these leaders to size is to signal to the rest that the top brass is watching and will have the last say in how things run in the state.

It is believed that these leaders were dropped following allegations of graft or related complaints that had reached the ears of the central leadership. But both Khadse and Mehta had been punished by the party by being dropped from the cabinet in 2016 and 2019, respectively.

“The reason to drop Khadse was that he continued to be caustic and bitter about Fadnavis and central leadership after he was sidelined, even in the Assembly. The CM was also upset with the way Mehta had dragged him in the MP mill compound controversy and had reacted to his being dropped from the cabinet this year,” said a senior BJP leader.

Purohit, similarly, had criticized the central leadership in a video in 2015.

It is being said that both Tawde and Bawankule were not given tickets on the back of complaints made against the way they were running their departments. But Bawankule has so far been projected as among the better performing ministers and several others in the Fadnavis cabinet had faced charges of corruption. He had, however, been asked by party leadership to contest from Katol, as the BJP did not have a strong enough candidate against NCP’s Anil Deshmukh, but had refused.

“The underlying message is that this is not the old BJP run by Mahajan-Munde and Gadkari camps. It is the new BJP run by the central leaders,” said a political analyst.

None of these senior leaders were in a position to protest even without knowing the reasons for being dropped. “The political scenario is such that the BJP has a one-sided mandate, which is not dependent on individual state leaders, even if they are six-term legislators. This also means the central leadership can assert their will and shape the leadership of their choice. This also indicates that Fadnavis is the tallest leader in Maharashtra today. Most leaders who have lost out have been seen as his rivals or not been in his best books,” said Abhay Deshpande, political analyst.

The shaping of the new BJP in Maharashtra has been done by not just dropping senior leaders, but also by giving a big push to the incumbent state chief Chandrakant Patil.

Ensuring Patil gets a safe seat of Kothrud for his electoral debut is the leadership’s way of projecting him as the party’s Maratha face and a mass leader, someone who can be a CM contender in the future.