There are many unproven allegations against Sharad Pawar. One that is not is that he mumbles -- and by and large keeps silent about the attacks of Bal Thackeray and Gopinath Munde on his character and integrity.No longer. The Maratha warlord has been in a fighting mood since campaigning began for the Lok Sabha elections. And every word is clearly enunciated, heard loud and clear by rural crowds across Maharashtra. And he is no longer on the defensive.
Pawar has fashioned a belligerent style of his own, different from that adopted by Chhagan Bhujbal. His statements, though not of the fire-and-brimstone variety of Thackeray and Bhujbal, are now sharp and cutting.
Thackeray can no longer hope to take on Pawar and get away with it. Nor can Munde. For the Maratha chieftain is matching them measure for measure.
Vignettes:
In Parli-Vaijnath, Gopinath Munde's home town, Pawar asked Munde, before a 20,000 strong crowd, ``to clean up his home first, and then talk of Baramati''. Parli is Munde'spocketborough as Baramati is Pawar's. Munde has often made allegations of Pawar's alleged connections with don Dawood Ibrahim. When Pawar mentioned the notoriety that Parli has gained in recent months, becoming synonymous with rapes and molestations, Parli applauded.
By now, however, Pawar has gained enough confidence from the inability of the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party government to prove any of their allegations against him raked up in the course of the 1995 Assembly elections. What's more Munde, Maharashtra's Minister for Home, sheepishly admitted on television that he had no proof about Pawar's alleged Dawood connections but had desperately needed a camapign issue at the time. Pawar is making ample use of this confession and of the government's bungling over the Enron deal to score some brownie points.
Helped by the ground realities in Maharashtra following the alleged bungling by the Sena-BJP alliance in the last three years, Pawar is taking on not just the Thackeray-Munde duo but even theRashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh which he believes was behind the sustained campaign against him. And his weapon: the claim that ``Ganpati Drinks Milk.''
This was a rumour that overtook the world more than a year ago. People have long wondered where the thought originated. Pawar offers a clue : ``It came from the RSS headquarters in Nagpur. They were experimenting. They wished to ascertain how quickly they could spread a rumour. And I must compliment them. For they succeeded immensely.''
Then he asks, ``But how come Chief Minister Manohar Joshi's Ganpati drank milk, while the Deputy Chief Minister's did not?'' At the time Munde was applauded as the rationalist while Joshi, who claimed that he had successfully fed milk to his idol, was condemned as an obscurantist. Pawar puts a spin on it : ``Well, the Chief Minister himself said that those who had committed punya were rewarded by Ganapati. And those he did not, were not.'' Get it?
Joshi alone is spared by Pawar in his speeches: no mention by name andcriticisms are limited to Government policy. After all, of the triumvirate of Thackeray-Joshi-Munde, it is the Chief Minister alone who has steered clear of allegations against Pawar. What's more, on more than one occasion, he has said in no uncertain terms, that ``indeed there is no single piece of document that can help to stick any allegation on Pawar''.
As for Atal Behari Vajpayee, he makes rural crowds laugh by saying, ``This brahmachari mounts the bridal horse at the age of sanyas. The bride (power) yet eludes.''
This is a different idiom from that which Maharashtra has heard before, shorn of the dramatics relied upon by his rivals to achieve the same effect. Moreover, there is none of the personal abuse (usage of all kinds of animal terms to describe Congress leaders including Sonia Gandhi) that has become Thackeray's trademark.
The Sena tiger has often gloated that his kind of Thakri bhasha (robust language) is not everybody's forte. ``How right,'' says Pawar. But not quite as Thackeray wouldwish it to be interpreted. ``Thackeray has been brought up in Mumbai. We come from the villages. And I am sure he has not yet sampled the kind of abusive terminology we are capable of. But then we are refined, cultured. We do not believe in being crude. So let Thackeray be warned. We are no cowards. Only just a bit more sophisticated.''
In any case, says Pawar, he is now ``No 2 on Thackeray's hit list,'' displaced from the top by Sonia. And he springs to the defence of India's bahu. ``In an Indian home a daughter-in-law belongs to her sasural, never her mayaka. Does Thackeray know about this? Let him safeguard the women in his own home, we will worry about the rest.''
But if there was still doubt about Sonia's claims to being Indian, Pawar has a trump card :the BJP has a Rajmata, who is a Nepali Princess. ``But she married our king. Do we ask her to quit India?''
Unlike Bhujbal, he does not quite say, ``Shut up.'' But the word hangs in the air.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
