People's Democracy

THE last three months in Maharashtra have seen multiple and severe setbacks to the Shiv Sena and the BJP, leading to disarray in the SS-BJP communal alliance. At the same time, the INC-NCP state government has been thrown on the defensive by a fresh spate of suicides of debt-ridden peasants in Vidarbha and by the increasing anger of all sections of the people due to massive power shortages and load-shedding. Rehabilitation of the flood-affected is yet another issue on which the government is facing discontent.

The results of the two by-elections in mid-November – to the Malwan assembly seat in Konkan and the North-West Mumbai parliamentary seat – came as a rude shock to the Shiv Sena. In Malwan, the Sena’s bete noire Narayan Rane not only romped home to a massive victory as the Congress candidate, but the Shiv Sena man there even lost his security deposit! This was despite the fact that all Sena top guns, including its supremo Bal Thackeray himself, personally took part in the election campaign. Uddhav Thackeray virtually camped in the constituency throughout. But all this was of no avail against the influence and muscle power that has been employed by Rane against the Sena ever since his revolt.

It may be recalled that Narayan Rane, the former chief minister of the Shiv Sena, had defected from the Sena last July, joined the Congress and was promptly made revenue minister in the INC-NCP regime. Rane formed the core of the Sena muscle power and he also played a leading role in the earlier communal riots engineered by the Sena.

There have been earlier defections from the Shiv Sena by Chhagan Bhujbal, Ganesh Naik, Sanjay Nirupam and others. But none of these have ever had the kind of impact that Rane’s revolt has had. Rane has a strong personal base in the Konkan region and also in Mumbai, both of which were considered as traditional Sena bastions. Ten Sena MLAs and several municipal corporators owe allegiance to him. Rane, who was close to Bal Thackeray’s nephew Raj, has continued to launch a broadside attack on Thackeray’s son Uddhav, the working president of the Sena who has been groomed as the heir apparent. After the Malwan victory, Rane has also targeted Bal Thackeray himself.

In Mumbai, once a Sena bastion, Priya Dutt of the Congress won the seat and beat the notorious Sena leader Madhukar Sarpotdar (severely indicted by the Justice Srikrishna Commission for his role in the 1993 Mumbai riots) by a margin which was much larger than that gained by her father Sunil Dutt in the 2004 elections.

Within days of this drubbing, the Sena chief’s nephew Raj Thackeray unfurled yet another banner of revolt by resigning from all his posts in the Sena. There followed a fortnight of hectic manoeuvring by both sides and the stalemate continued till last week, when Raj Thakeyray finally quit the Sena itself and announced that the would form a new political party. This train of events has left the Shiv Sena shattered as never before.

The BJP is secretly happy at the Sena’s plight and it was, and still is, harbouring hopes of wresting the post of leader of the opposition from the Sena, once the 10 Sena MLAs who are with Narayan Rane resign their seats and contest fresh by-elections as candidates of the Congress. That would leave the BJP with more seats than the Sena in the state assembly.

But at the same time, the BJP in Maharashtra is also in confusion as a result of the tensions and bickerings within the BJP-RSS at the national level after Advani’s certificates of secularism bestowed on Jinnah. The recent drama surrounding the expulsion of Uma Bharati has further dented the BJP’s image. The BJP national conference marking 25 years of its formation is being held in Mumbai at the end of December. Advani has announced that he would be stepping down as BJP president at this conference, fuelling considerable speculation and infighting for the succession.

But the latest missile to have hit the BJP is, of course, the involvement of six of its MPs in the Cash for Query scandal and of three more of its MPs in the MPLADS scandal, both of which have hit the national headlines. Two of these BJP MPs – M K Anna Patil and Y G Mahajan – are from Maharashtra and Anna Patil was even a minister in the Atal Behari Vajpayee cabinet! This has once again exposed the venality of the BJP. All these events have led to great disarray in the SS-BJP communal alliance.

Narayan Rane’s spurning the overtures from the NCP and joining the Congress instead has led to greater tensions in the INC-NCP alliance as well. Three MLAs from the Konkan region who have solidly been with Rane have already resigned their assembly seats and the Congress has promised to put them up as its candidates for by-elections that will be held on January 21. But since the NCP had secured second place in all these seats in the 2004 assembly elections, it is refusing to concede these seats to the Congress, adding for good measure that if these MLAs were to join the NCP, it would give them NCP tickets! This impasse is yet to be resolved.

With Rane’s smashing victory in the Malwan seat, he has begun to eye the chief ministership and the anti-Vilasrao Deshmukh factions in the Congress are feeding these ambitions. This is leading to a realignment of different factions in the Congress itself, with one-time arch foes Vilasrao Deshmukh and Ranjit Deshmukh coming together to counter the new threat.

Thus, while the setbacks to the Shiv Sena are no doubt a welcome development, this entire drama has also exposed the opportunistic nature of all four major bourgeois players as well.

A last-ditch effort was made by the SS and the BJP to give a chauvinist twist to the unfortunate events that occurred at Belgaum in Karnataka last month. Belgaum and its surrounding Marathi-speaking areas have long been a bone of contention between Karnataka and Maharashtra ever since the formation of Maharashtra in 1960.

The Belgaum municipal corporation recently passed a resolution by a majority vote demanding that these Marathi-speaking areas be merged with Maharashtra. In response, the Karnataka government undemocratically superseded the municipal corporation. Further, activists of the Karnataka Rakshana Vedike blackened the face of Belgaum mayor Vijay More when he was in Bangalore. This was seized upon by the SS and BJP to launch a chauvinistic campaign. The issue still continues to simmer and has now been referred to the centre.

The INC-NCP state government has been thrown on the defensive due to two main reasons. The first is the spate of suicides of over 170 debt-ridden peasants, mainly in the cotton-producing Vidarbha region, during the last few months. These suicides led to a visit by the chairman of the National Commission of Farmers, Dr M S Swaminathan, to the region in October. After the uproar over the issue, the state government was forced to concede that as many as 1060 peasants have committed suicide in Maharashtra in the five years from 2001-2005.

In the face of these suicides, the callous response of the state government has been to rub salt into the wounds of the cotton-growing peasantry of Vidarbha, Marathwada and Khandesh. It has done this by slashing the price paid to cotton farmers under the Monopoly Cotton Procurement Scheme by nearly Rs 500 per quintal, from Rs 2300 paid last year to Rs 1800 this year. In the assembly election campaign last year, the INC-NCP alliance had cynically pledged to pay Rs 2700 per quintal to cotton farmers!

The state of institutional credit facilities in Vidarbha is appalling, with an overwhelming majority of peasants having to depend on rapacious private money-lenders. The indiscriminate imports of greatly subsidised foreign cotton and other agricultural products have also adversely affected the peasantry in the state. Grilled in the state assembly session at Nagpur, the government belatedly announced a so-called package for farmers, which is hardly likely to give most of them much relief.

The second issue on which the state government has been put in the dock is the massive power shortage that has led to unbearable load-shedding of up to six hours per day in urban areas and up to 12 hours per day in rural areas. This has severely affected both industry and agriculture. The state government has admitted that there is a power shortfall of 4000 MW, which is likely to increase to 5000 MW next year! This has led to a spate of both organised and spontaneous protests by the people all over Maharashtra.

The main reason for this state of affairs is that while the earlier Congress and SS-BJP regimes were having their thoroughly corrupt fling with Enron, for the last 12 years the MSEB was prevented from setting up any power generation plant of its own. In 2001, when the Enron plant was forced to close down due to the prohibitive cost of its power and the massive Left-led agitation against it, the state was left with nothing to fall back upon.

Now, after secret and opaque negotiations lasting for months, the government of India has shelled out a whopping Rs 10,000 crore to American companies like GE and Bechtel and has taken control of the Dabhol Power Plant. A public sector company called the Ratnagiri Gas and Power Company has been set up and it will be run by the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC). It has been announced that by May 2006, the Dabhol Power Plant will generate 750 MW of electricity – at what cost no one knows! And by the time this new power becomes available, the demand will have further risen. Thus the power shortage and the load-shedding will continue. Such are the wages of the Enron deal.

This political situation, with the SS-BJP communal alliance in disarray and the INC-NCP state government on the defensive, opens up real possibilities for the advance of the Left forces.

In Maharashtra, this was seen in the rousing response elicited by the September 29 all India strike and the CPI(M)-led independent struggle for food, land and employment the same day which mobilised nearly 1.75 lakh people at 103 centers in 29 of the 35 districts where the Party has a presence; in the success of the November 18 CPI(M) demonstrations demanding the enactment of the Tribal Forest Rights Bill which mobilised 1 lakh people; in the December 13 statewide actions by the CP(M), AIKS and AIAWU which mobilised several thousands on the issues of the WTO Hongkong meet, peasant suicides, fall in cotton prices and power shortages; and in other successful actions by the mass organisations during this period.

Now the CPI(M) in Maharashtra is gearing itself up in right earnest to begin the implementation of the ‘One Year Plan for Party Development’ that was recently adopted by the state committee after fruitful discussion.

The other major activity in the coming month is the hectic preparations going on all over the state to ensure the success of the 31st national conference of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) that is being held at Nashik from January 28 to 31, 2006. An AIKS national conference is being held in Maharashtra after 51 years and hence it has generated great enthusiasm.