Maharashtra churn: Why Chavan's desertion is a big loss for Congress

Within weeks of the high-profile Milind Deora and Baba Siddiqui severing their ties with it, the Congress party received a major jolt, albeit an expected one, on Monday (February 12), as its strongman from Nanded in Maharashtra’s Marathwada region, Ashok Chavan, turned in his resignation from the party. Chavan, who also served as the state’s chief minister for two brief stints like his late father and Congress stalwart Shankarrao Chavan, also resigned from the Maharashtra Assembly as the MLA from Bhokar constituency.

The 65-year old Maratha leader has claimed that he will reveal his future political course “after two days” and refrained from divulging what finally forced his long-anticipated departure from the Congress. Sources close to Chavan, however, told The Federal that the former CM could join the BJP later this week. Talks between Chavan and the saffron party, which had played a key role in forcing his exit from the Chief Minister’s Office back in November 2010 in wake of the Adarsh Society Scam, had been going on intermittently “for over three years”, it is learnt.

White Paper connection

Ironically, the White Paper on 10 years of the erstwhile UPA government’s performance that was tabled in Parliament by Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman last week, also mentioned the Adarsh Society Scam as one of the several alleged corruption scandals that had tainted Dr. Manmohan Singh’s UPA regime. Chavan, however, told reporters in Mumbai, that his resignation from the Congress and the listing of the Adarsh Scam in the White Paper by Sitharaman were not connected.

Irrespective of whatever Chavan’s next political stop may be, what is clear is that his exit would be a major loss for the Congress, even if the party could have done little to stop it. Unlike Deora, a former two-term MP and Union minister in the UPA government, who inherited his political standing from his more illustrious father, the late Congress stalwart Murli Deora, or Siddiqui, who had a limited grassroots base in the suburbs of Bandra and Khar, Chavan is a mass leader with significant clout in Marathwada.

Chavan holds big sway

The former CM also belongs to the Maratha community, a formidable vote bloc in Maharashtra. As a voting bloc, the Marathas have evaded the BJP in the past, which instead chose to bank on leaders such as the late Gopinath Munde, among others, who hailed from different OBC communities. In recent years, though, the saffron party has begun wooing Marathas afresh. It earned key Maratha allies in Eknath Shinde and Ajit Pawar after ostensibly encouraging the rebellion of the two leaders against their parent parties, the Shiv Sena and the NCP, respectively. If Chavan joins the BJP, as is being speculated, the party will have won over another influential Maratha face to its side.

However, the BJP’s Maratha nightmare hasn’t ended. Until recently, the state’s ruling coalition, led by Eknath Shinde and Devendra Fadnavis, was trying to douse the Maratha-OBC reservation stir. When it finally managed to do so by accepting the reservation-linked demands of the Maratha agitators, the saffron party ended up slighting influential OBC leaders, including the Chhagan Bhujbal of Ajit Pawar’s NCP faction, who are now on the warpath with the Shinde-Fadnavis government in protest against the possible dilution of quotas for pre-existing OBCs to accommodate the Marathas.

How the BJP appeases its existing vote base among OBCs while simultaneously keeping the Maratha voters close remains to be seen. Having Chavan within the party fold and Maratha leaders such as Eknath Shinde and Ajit Pawar as allies could prove useful to the BJP in such an endeavour.

Congress' RS poll headache

For the Congress, though, Chavan’s loss could prove hard to recover from, particularly since it comes months ahead of the Lok Sabha polls and just days before the party hoped to win a Rajya Sabha seat from the state. Chavan’s exit, Maharashtra Congress leaders told The Federal, is "certain to upset the numbers game for the Congress" in the impending Rajya Sabha election as the former CM is known to enjoy the support of at least 10 other Congress MLAs who may follow his lead and quit the party soon or as another leader said, “cross-vote against the official Congress candidate in the Rajya Sabha poll” before deciding their individual political course.

Most in the Congress believe Chavan’s departure from the party was “only a matter of time”. The former Bhokar MLA, who had followed his father into electoral politics nearly four decades ago and was the party’s only leader who managed to win his Lok Sabha seat, Nanded, from Maharashtra in 2014, had been sulking ever since he lost the seat narrowly to the BJP in 2019. The formation of the Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government, in which Chavan served as a key minister, had “delayed his resignation”, said a Congress leader, adding, “once the MVA government fell, it was clear that Chavan wouldn’t be with us for very long”.

'Easy prey for BJP'

Though many Congress leaders now claim, perhaps even rightly, that Chavan’s alleged involvement in the Adarsh Scam had made him “easy prey” for the BJP, which has gained infamy for using central probe agencies to intimidate political rivals, a section of party leaders also believe “changing internal dynamics of the party” abetted the former CM’s exit. The otherwise mild-mannered Chavan, with his reputation of being an “organisation man with the added legacy of Shankarrao Chavan, a staunch Congress loyalist”, it is learnt, had never got along well with incumbent Maharashtra Congress chief Nana Patole, a BJP import into the Congress.

Internal squabbles

Congress leader Sanjay Nirupam also hinted at Chavan’s discomfort within the party as the result of his “frustration with the working style of one leader (read: Patole)”. Nirupam posted on X that statements by his party colleagues dubbing Chavan a liability or blaming the ED for his resignation from the Congress were “given in haste”. Hailing Chavan as an asset for the party whose loss cannot be compensated, Nirupam claimed that the former CM’s concerns against the working style of that “one leader” had been shared “from time to time” with the party’s central leadership but to no avail.

Multiple Congress sources told The Federal that Chavan wasn’t the only one in the party who had recurring run-ins with Patole and that several leaders had been imploring the Congress high command to either appoint Chavan as Maharashtra Congress chief or, “at the very least replace Patole with someone who can unite the party and revive it at the grassroots”. However, the Congress leadership chose to allow Patole, who is known to enjoy former party president Rahul Gandhi’s confidence, to continue as the state unit chief while elevating Chavan as a member of the Congress Working Committee, a role in which, sources said, “Chavan had no interest”.