Inside Track: Not Very Pleasant

Residents of the uber exclusive Mount Pleasant Road in Mumbai’s Malabar Hill, who include the Birlas, the Ruias, the general manager of the Central Railways and a smattering of aristocratic Parsis, whose families have lived here for over a century, are waiting anxiously for their neighbour, Eknath Shinde, to vacate the chief minister’s bungalow, Varsha. Shinde’s arrival as CM turned the tony Malabar Hill in SoBo upside down. Apart from Varsha, Shinde also occupied two other government bungalows in the neighbourhood, Agradut and Nandanvan. As a hard working grassroots politician, Shinde’s house is open day and night to visitors from all over the state seeking redressal for their grievances. They were all hospitably served endless cups of tea and aloo bondas. The visitors carelessly threw around their paper plates and cups, crowded the narrow roads shouting slogans and plastered walls with political posters. Traffic was held up by the police every time the former chief minister’s cavalcade drove up and down the hill. Visitors to houses and apartments on leafy Mt Pleasant Road – where incidentally Jinnah’s dilapidated bungalow, South Court, has been lying vacant for half a century – were directed to park on adjoining roads, adding to the traffic jams. In desperation, last year, the Malabar Hill Residents Association approached the state Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar asking him to intervene, but he expressed helplessness. The residents’ tale of woe was that CMs had come and gone from Varsha, a 12,000-square-foot heritage bungalow, since the mid 1960s – starting with the gentlemanly Vasantrao Patil and including Shinde’s predecessors Uddhav Thackeray and Devendra Fadnavis. All the CMs had lived peacefully with their neighbours, but Shinde was a different ball game altogether.

LoP, Not Party Chief

Congress members were taken aback by Rahul Gandhi’s jovial mood in the wake of successive defeats in Haryana and Maharashtra. Asked by a senior leader at a party meet about the reason for his good humour, Gandhi explained that he believed in being sombre in victory and celebratory in defeat. Lord Shiva was testing the party’s firm resolve and tapasya for 2029, he said. His party men are, however, irked by Gandhi’s hands-off approach during the two recent Assembly elections. He avoided meeting senior party persons to address their complaints, declined to speak individually to rebel Congresspersons and request them to step down, relied excessively on pollster Sunil Kanugolu despite his disastrous track record, and insisted on projecting Adani as the key electoral issue when there were more pressing subjects. Gandhi refers most Congress organisation matters to general secretary K C Venugopal, who is only too happy to sequester his boss. In fact, now that Priyanka is an MP, Venugopal is keen to keep her also under his wing.

Gandhi believes his main role is now Leader of the Opposition and mundane party issues should be delegated to others. Since 23 senior Congressmen got blackballed in 2020 after their letter to Sonia Gandhi requesting introspection in the party was leaked to the media, no senior Congress leader is willing to bell the cat and openly take on Venugopal. But, some secretly applaud the recent campaign by INDIA constituents to question Gandhi’s suitability to head the bloc. In fact, they seem to be firing from their allies’ shoulders. Mallikarjun Kharge’s recent advice to party workers to stick to ground realities and local issues such as inflation, unemployment and rural distress etc and not depend on national issues and national leaders to win elections for them, could well have been actually directed at his boss. Significantly, Venugopal insisted on being present when Kharge recently requested for a one-on-one meeting with his boss.

Fadnavis Is The One

NCP leader Ajit Pawar’s personality has undergone a sea change. The formerly dour, unsmiling Maratha chieftain was beaming and talkative while interacting recently with Delhi journalists. Pawar’s transformation may be partly because of the advice of his poll consultant Naresh Arora to project a softer, smiling visage, but also, after the Maharashtra victory, he has finally emerged from uncle Sharad Pawar’s shadow. Ajit and Devendra Fadnavis have formed a cosy twosome, leaving Eknath Shinde out of the charmed circle. Incidentally, some vested interests in the BJP secretly encouraged Shinde to sulk and claim chief ministership. In fact, Fadnavis’s elevation as CM was never in doubt. For one, the RSS fully backed the swayamsevak next door in Nagpur, who earlier gracefully and dutifully stepped down for Shinde when asked to do so by the party. The BJP is aware that Fadnavis’s Brahmin caste is actually not a disadvantage, since the Mahayuti is top-heavy with Marathas, something the OBCs resent. Besides, the BJP is determined to keep tight control of Maharashtra, the only cash-rich state other than Gujarat that is not ruled by the Opposition, such as Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Telangana.

 

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