Gopinath Munde: The loss of a mass leader

Maharashtra has seen two mass political leaders with following across castes and communities in recent years. One is Sharad Pawar, now riding into his political sunset. The other was Gopinath Munde, 64, whose life was snuffed out in a car accident in New Delhi on June 3. They shared the same birthday, December 12. A third leader from any party with the same influence is hard to come by.

Pawar, born in 1940, is nine years older than Munde and became the state's youngest chief minister in 1978. Munde was not even a legislator then, his Renapur Assembly victory still two years away. As a key BJP man, Munde caught up with Pawar in the 1990s and threw the mightiest challenge he ever faced by painting the Congress as corrupt and linking the party to the underworld. It led to the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance forming the government in 1995.

Gopinath Munde

But BJP finished second in the polls and Munde's lot was to serve as Sena leader Manohar Joshi's deputy. Sensing BJP's parliamentary ambitions, the Sena had virtually fixed the match with a seat-sharing template for the Assembly elections: Sena contested 171 seats and BJP 117. The scenario at the moment of his death suggested that Munde would finally break that mould for the October Assembly polls.

With Narendra Modi's ascendance, and Sena's refusal to acknowledge his contribution to their Lok Sabha victories from Maharashtra, the state BJP is bristling with anger. It would like an equal share in seats or a rotational leadership in the state government now. The best man to lead this push, in the late Pramod Mahajan's absence, was Munde. The two had met in college and become close friends. Munde later married Mahajan's sister Pradnya.

Munde's rural development portfolio in the Modi government was to beef him up for a larger role in Maharashtra. He had provided the pixels to the Modi sweep by bringing in Republican Party of India the (RPI) and other diverse strands such as the farmer's lobby into the alliance. His candidate Mahadev Jankar of Rashtriya Samaj Paksh pared down Pawar's daughter Supriya Sule's margin to 69,719 votes, hitherto unimaginable in the family bastion. The campaign in the region centred on a single point: The Pawars are not invincible. It almost worked. Dismayed BJP cadres are already wondering if his intra-party rival Nitin Gadkari will be able to carry forward the BJP agenda of humbling Sena but retaining it as a partner.

Munde showed his long-term vision as a politician by breaking the Congress-NCP dominance over Maharashtra's sugar cooperatives by directly or indirectly floating new companies and getting them funded by urban cooperative banks his party could influence. He had earlier led the 'Sink Enron into the Arabian Sea' campaign in the 1990s, when he allegedly linked Congressmen with kickbacks received from the global energy giant for the Dabhol Power Project.

Perhaps India's most accident-prone politician, his fourth major crash finally proved fatal. Munde often courted trouble by trying to force his chopper pilots to take off in bad weather. Luckily for him, they didn't always oblige. On at least two occasions, they dropped him in the middle of nowhere to trek to the nearest road because the conditions were too dangerous to fly in.

Munde dressed well in a crisp white kurta-pajama and a dark Nehru waistcoat, often pulling out a pocket comb to set his hair even during TV interviews. He was invariably late, as if the calendar, not the watch, mattered. He always returned missed calls on his cell phone even from unknown numbers. He couldn't bear seeing his daughter Pankaja living in the US, doing household chores on her own, and persuaded her to return home. Now an MLA from Parli, the 34-year-old may be his political heir, but not of the same stature.

(The writer is a political observer and commentator)