Pawar meet | Adani's presence shows billionaires can reshape electoral verdicts

A billionaire and his clout can well outweigh, tweak, alter and reshape voters’ verdict or the popular will of people with impunity and without upsetting order, or system, as such.

This is the crux of the bizarre revelations made by Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar in a videographed and, thus, recorded interview.

News websites that aired Ajit’s interview earlier this week said on Thursday: “...Sharad Pawar confirmed industrialist Gautam Adani hosted a high-profile meeting in 2019, in which the possibility of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) supporting the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was on the menu.”

Also read | Maharashtra | Will agrarian distress cast a shadow on Assembly poll outcome?

Those present at that meeting were Sharad and Ajit Pawar, Gautam Adani, and Union Home Minister Amit Shat, it was reported. This comes with less than a week to go for Maharashtra to elect a new Assembly.

Amid the high-pitched electioneering in Maharashtra, the real issues triggered by Ajit Pawar’s disclosures are rather being brushed off as insignificant. It is so despite NCP founding chief Sharad Pawar confirming what his nephew Ajit claimed.

Conflict of interest

But the main point is that it’s dollops of wealth and not the members elected to the House through popular vote who decide who takes the reins of the state.

Ajit Pawar, who leads one of the two factions of the NCP, revealed in his interview that before his swearing-in as Deputy CM (though for a brief and abruptly ended stint), during the wee hours of a November morning in 2019, was a meeting that took place to decide the fate of Maharashtra.

Also read: Maharashtra polls: Rebels, discordant allies pose twin troubles for NDA

According to Ajit, Adani was present at the meeting alongside Amit Shah, besides some of the key players in Maharashtra politics.

A spokesperson of the Adani Group reportedly declined to comment on claims made by Ajit and there has been silence from Adani’s side ever since. The conglomerate has a lot of business operations in Maharashtra and the group chief's presence at such a meeting can trigger conflict of interest concerns.

Splits and alliances

In the interview, Ajit remarked, “Don’t you know? This happened five years ago. Everybody knows where the meeting took place…everyone was there. Let me tell you again. Amit Shah was there, Gautam Adani was there, Praful Patel (NCP leader) was there, Devendra Fadnavis (BJP leader) was there, Ajit Pawar was there, Pawar Saheb (Ajit’s uncle Sharad Pawar) was there.”

Also read: Maharashtra polls| Why Ajit Pawar-led NCP is against any personal attack on Sharad Pawar

In 2019, Ajit, along with a few NCP legislators, had walked over to the BJP. Fadnavis and Ajit were sworn in as Chief Minister and Deputy CM, respectively, by the Governor. Subsequently, Ajit and his MLAs went back to the NCP party fold, Fadnavis' government fell and Shiv Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray took over as the CM with the support of the NCP and Congress.

Uddhav's government lasted a couple of years till the Sena underwent a split, and Eknath Shinde became the CM with support from the BJP and Ajit Pawar, who once again broke away from his uncle. Ajit became Deputy CM again, albeit under a different CM.

Moral justification

Obviously, the 2019 meeting disclosed by Ajit, where Amit Shah and Adani, with Maharashtra’s politicians, discussed the idea of a BJP-NCP coalition government in the state, triggered a churn in Maharashtra politics.

Watch | Marathas, Marathi Manoos, and Mahagathbandhans: Decoding Maharashtra's Maha Yudh

This went on till Ajit joined the Sena-BJP coalition government and it still persists as Maharashtra gears up for the November 20 Assembly polls.

Ajit’s viewpoint in the interview was that he did no wrong by switching from the NCP to the BJP in 2019, as it was with the full knowledge of Sharad Pawar. Instead, the nephew was trying to put the uncle in the dock.

The junior Pawar even justified, though in a roundabout way, his 2023 move as a sequel to the earlier one, where he took a good share of NCP legislators to join the ruling Sena-BJP combine to become its yet another component.

Ajit’s disclosures have come at a time when Maharashtra is caught up in fierce electioneering. His remarks are clearly aimed at winning some of his lost moral ground and regain some support from Sharad Pawar’s group.

BJP unfazed

The extraordinary claims made by Ajit cannot be without the knowledge and approval of the BJP.

So far, the BJP has not offered any comments about the revelations made by its coalition partner in Maharashtra. The only clue to the BJP’s view on this has come through a newspaper report that quoted a BJP source as saying the meeting mentioned by Ajit “actually happened in 2017”. This indicates the possibility of more than one meeting of such an unseemly nature.

But, there is a catch again in what the “BJP source” told the newspaper because Amit Shah was BJP president in 2017 and not a Union minister. He joined the Union Cabinet only in 2019.

Thus, the “source” implied that there can be no misdemeanour on the part of the Modi 1.0 government in Shah joining the meeting that Sharad Pawar now says was “hosted by Adani over dinner”.

Watch | Rhetoric vs reality: BJP's dynasty politics in Maharashtra, Jharkhand

Murky politics

Moreover, in 2017, Maharashtra had a BJP-Sena government where the Sena had neither split nor was there a possibility of it exploding the way it did in 2022. The only possibility is that the BJP could have tried to jettison the Sena’s support by replacing it with that of the then united NCP.

Anyway, what followed in Maharashtra after the 2019 episode turned out to be rather murky. Even the Supreme Court was forced, though without the knowledge or benefit of what Ajit said the other day, to dub the current Maharashtra government as “illegal”. But undeterred by this, the same coalition is going to polls to seek another term in office.

This raises questions about the role of moneybags in politics both post and pre-elections and the alacrity of the main political players to accept this wholeheartedly or remain unmoved by what has been said.

Also read: Maharashtra polls 2024: A look at the high-stakes election battle

Radia tapes controversy

This is in sharp contrast to what had happened over a decade-and-a-half ago, when corporate lobbyist Niira Radia’s taped telephonic conversations with select politicos, tycoons and journalists were leaked to media and transcripts of these were published in a couple of periodicals.

Her phone calls were recorded by Income Tax sleuths and she could be heard, among other things, lobbying for the appointment of certain persons as Union ministers. This was referred to as 'fixing Cabinet berths'.

Those caught on the phone called the conversations “casual, incidental, off-the-cuff remarks and non-serious”. But there was a CBI probe in the wake of this scandal.

Now, though, the government and its agencies appear to be looking the other way. The only difference between then and now is that a lobbyist has been replaced by a business magnate.

Isn’t politics inevitably getting overwhelmed by Corporatocracy? Or, is an oligarchy in the making?