The Enforcement Directorate (ED) sleuths arrested Tamil Nadu minister V Senthil Balaji recently in connection with cash for jobs charges. Governor RN Ravi ordered the minister's dismissal. Subsequently, for reasons best known to him, the governor retracted his decision. The legislators who joined the BJP government in Maharashtra under the leadership of Ajit Pawar on Sunday, unlike Balaji, would flick off ED's radar.
Most probably, the brand of politics Sharad Pawar's nephew and his loyalists follow is not familiar to Senthil Balaji. Perhaps, Tamil Nadu is a different ball game for the BJP and Senthil Balaji doesn't have enough clout to bring with him as many MLAs as Ajit Pawar could. Whatever, realpolitik makes a hell of a difference in this age.
By deserting Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and joining the Eknath Shinde-led BJP government, Ajit Pawar won for himself the plum post of deputy chief minister of Maharashtra from merely being the leader of opposition party. No longer this brand of politics can be dubbed as a political drama. Dramas are presently the reality.
While the nephew Pawar and his loyalists took oath as deputy chief minister and cabinet ministers in Maharashtra, the NCP leadership claimed that many of those who crossed over to the BJP did so in order to save themselves from being arrested by ED sleuths.
As for Ajit Pawar, the ED had submitted a chargesheet in the Maharashtra State Cooperative (MSC) Bank scam in which it had earlier attached the properties of a sugar mill linked to Ajit Pawar and his wife Sunetra. However, according to reports, Ajit Pawar and his wife's names were later dropped from the ED chargesheet.
This is not the first time that Indian politics is going into a tailspin.
Those who are familiar with Indian politics would not be surprised by Ajit Pawar's move. Because, for quite some time now there have been rumours of Ajit Pawar, though relentlessly denied by him, planning to quit the party led by his uncle Sharad Pawar.
The way Eknath Shinde and his faction toppled the Uddhav Thackeray-led government and the events prior to that can be summed up by the words of Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot. He had said that BJP has a history of toppling democratically elected governments.
"They [BJP] now have a history of doing this from Arunachal, Goa, and Manipur. In Karnataka, they toppled our government via horsetrading. What happened in Madhya Pradesh is also now known to all," Gehlot had said sometime back.
