Maharashtra politics under the double engine ‘Sarkar’ (government), a Marathi word used many a times to denote a feudal title for political satraps as well, has been engulfed by the storm caused by the unholy alliance of corporates, communalist, casteist, rural feudal remnants and patriarchal forces in a venomous cocktail with the gangster mafia combine. The state has been playing the role of a bartender mixing the ingredients. The dance of death is unfolding in many parts of the state.
Two districts of Marathwada, Beed and Parbhani are seething with anger over two incidents of murder – one by the gangster mafia and the other by police in custody. In an encounter murder by the police of an accused in a sexual assault case involving minor girls in a school run by RSS affiliated persons in Badalpur, Thane district has been confirmed by a judicial magistrate accusing 4 police personnel of murder.
Politics in the recent past has been dominated by Late Gopinath Munde and Pramod Mahajan, an OBC and a Brahmin, tied by ideology as well as landed property and corporate interests. The nextgen of the Mundes is in the saddle now with his one daughter being an ex-MP and another currently an MLA and a Minister now. Her cousin Dhananjay Munde, now a minister under NCP-Ajit was promoted in the earlier career by Sharad Pawar. He is the one who is now in the eye of the storm. Sharad Pawar is on record about how he rescued his then protégé from many accusations when Dhananjay Munde made personal attacks after leaving Sharad Pawar's party.
Beed, a semi-arid Marathwada district having a rich legacy of anti-Nizam struggle, is dominantly populated by Vanjara (OBC) and Maratha castes followed by a significant Dalit population. Most of the agriculture is rainfed while the groundwater is severely depleting. Thus the land is largely unproductive and the produce is at the mercy of the vagaries of weather and now increasingly of the climate change. Migration is hence a necessity and not an option.
Beed provides the sugarcane cutter workers - men, women and children - to the cooperative and erstwhile cooperative (now gobbled by the political class into private companies) sugar factories in Maharashtra, adjoining Karnataka, Telangana and Tamil Nadu. These workers, mainly from Banjara and Dalit communities, are hired by the contractors through Mukadams (a façade for gangsters and henchmen of the mafia, mainly from the same caste). Workers are paid a lump sum amount in advance. There are reports of abuse that the women workers are taken along only after they bear children and their uterus is removed to avoid any loss of working days during menstruation. One more reported reason is to avoid unwanted pregnancy due to sexual exploitation by the landowners in the sugar cane belt. Any one not moving out after the advance is paid is dealt with ‘suitably’ by the Mukadams.
However high speed winds blowing through the district are conducive to generate electricity and are now being exploited for power generation. This is seized upon by the corporates now instead of a class of rich individuals like Sachin Tendulkar earlier. Private power producers like Jindal and Adani are making huge investments to generate wind electricity at lower costs, earning huge subsidies and blending this with costlier thermal power. They have started reaping huge profits. The cost per installation of the equipment is around Rs 30 crore for a 3.2 MW windmill. It requires 8 acres of land each including approach road and uploading substation for the grid. The land is taken on lease for 30 years at around Rs.15000 per acre per year. The maintenance cost is not much with major recurring expenditure being only round the clock watch and ward. This is provided by the surrounding villages or the land owner himself to bring in some additional income. The payback period for the corporate is approximately 5 to 6 years followed by undiluted profiteering.
Parali town has a thermal power unit of Mahagenco, a public sector company. It generates fly ash in dry and wet forms. The dry fly ash is used by the cement manufacturing companies while the wet ash is used in brick manufacturing and other small-scale industries. The thermal power unit thus requires transportation of coal and fly ash. Overbilling is a norm generating cash.
The rivers flowing through the district are a source of illegal sand dredging which is controlled by the local mafia and gangsters with active political support.
In the village Massajog, Avada Green Energy (AVG) is executing a wind turbine project. Before the assembly elections some gangsters belonging to the mafia led by Walmik Karad demanded protection money of ₹2 crores from the company. The company had apparently paid ₹50 lakhs. Walmik Karad, son of a sugar cane cutter hailing from Vanjara community was employed by Gopinath Munde as a trusted person to escort the daughters to school. He is now very close to Dhananjay Munde and handles all his work in the constituency including management of the elections. His gang consisting mainly of Vanjara Mukadams barged into the office of the company and inflicted damages. Santosh Deshmukh, the young sarpanch of the village intervened to stop the gang from damaging the office. The sarpanch is from BJP and had been the election agent for Pankaja Munde. Santosh Deshmukh was abducted on the road and was driven around in the car. 3 persons mercilessly beat him with pipes and other weapons for about 3 hours. This cruel assault was recorded and shown live to the mafia head. His dead body was thrown out of the car after murder.
The company’s manager had approached the police for filing a FIR but the police declined. Reportedly after the intervention of the PMO and the home minister the police filed the FIR. Walmik Karad is one of the accused. He absconded and travelled all over the state and MP but the police could not trace him.
A BJP MLA, Suresh Dhas revealed the entire episode on the floor of the house during the winter season. He has been continuing to expose the murkier and murkier details of the gangster empire run by Walmik Karad with blessings from Dhananjay Munde.
The district has the highest number of licensed revolvers, and an even higher number of unlicensed weapons. 141 bodies were recovered unidentified in the last one year alone, with many cases of disappearances. Abduction and sexual assaults on young girls and women have also been reported. Mr Suresh Dhas has joined BJP after being in NCP for a long time. He led a huge demonstration on the Beed collectorate with the participation of all other MLAs from the district. Incidentally a majority of them are Marathas. Jarange Patil had also joined him. There has been a clamour for the resignation of Dhananjay Munde and not assigning him as the guardian minister. Guardian minister is an extra constitutional position for controlling all transactions in the district and thus controlling it politically. An absconding Walmik Karad could not be traced by the police for almost 23 days. He surrendered to the police in Pune travelling in a SUV. There have been reports of behind the scene political dealings in the matter. Ajit Pawar and his NCP have refused to ask for the resignation of Dhananjay Munde in the matter unless he is proven guilty. There are reports that Ajit Pawar has been put under a lot of pressure by the BJP, the home minister Amit Shah and the Maharashtra Chief minister and home minister Fadnavis. Under relentless pressure from Maharashtra’s opposition parties and the people, Fadnavis had to bow down to the demand of applying MOCCA against all the accused in the murder case including Walmik Karad.
Walmik Karad was the kingpin of the gangster mafia operations of illegal sand mining, transportation of dry fly ash to cement factories under contract, transportation of coal to the power plant from the railway station, unauthorised and illegal sale and transportation of wet ash to small scale industries and brick manufacturers through a fleet of hundreds. He also controlled the appointments and transfers of bureaucrats and the police in the district. The police were used to arrest people at his wish. One of the erstwhile collectors is on record that he sat in his office with a loaded revolver during his tenure. Suresh Dhas described the entire operation as a power of attorney given by the minister Dhananjay Munde, who was earlier the guardian minister, to Walmik Karad. It is ironic to note that Walmik Karad was also close to Suresh Dhas earlier but both of them fell apart after Dhananjay Munde and Karad tried to expand their operations into Suresh Dhas’s constituency. It’s a war for territory as well. Karad is reportedly having properties running into hundreds of crores in both agriculture and real estate in Beed, Solapur, Pune and abroad. Dhananjay Munde’s wife and Karad are partners in a logistical company involved in transportation of dry fly ash, where Dhananjay Munde was also a director earlier.
But this is nothing new. Gopinath Munde, nurtured by BJP for their social engineering with the active support of Pramod Mahajan, a darling of the corporates, mainly the Ambanis, has systematically built the entire empire. Gopinath Munde has been responsible for the expansion of BJP amongst the OBCs in Maharashtra. Both of them unfortunately had to face tragic, unexplained and unnatural deaths. Pankaja Munde, her sister and their cousin Dhananjay Munde continued to dominate this political economic empire in the district. Pankaja Munde was allegedly involved in corrupt practices in the supply of eatables to the schools. She is also reportedly owning breweries with uninterrupted water supply even during droughts in a water starved Marathwada.
With newer revelations Dhananjay Munde is under increasing pressure to resign. Both Karad and Dhananjay Munde can be troublesome to the Mahayuti and especially to NCP Ajit Pawar if they choose to spill the beans. The internal contradictions in the Mahayuti, BJP’s efforts to reduce the influence of both Ajit Pawar and Shinde in the long term has resulted into numerous delays in formation of the government, allotment of the portfolios and assigning of the guardian ministers, in spite of a brute majority manufactured by alleged manipulation of the election process with active connivance of the Election Commission.
Just before this incident in Beed, the adjoining district of Parbhani, having a significant population of Matang and other dalits witnessed an instigated violence by the hindutva forces. The Dalits came out on the streets in protest after a statue of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar was damaged by the hindutva forces. The police next day unleashed a combing operation to arrest the Dalit youths who had participated in the demonstrations. Police brutally assaulted the youth by entering the houses . There have been reports of assault on private parts of women as well. A Dalit youth studying in the 3rd year of law was subjected to severe torture and he died in the custody. The post-mortem report has very clearly brought out the internal hemorrhage due to several severe injuries on the back. Another Dalit leader who had a role to play in calming down the youth and persuading them not to become violent was labelled as the accused number one. He died of severe cardiac arrest. The chief minister and the home minister Fadnavis backed up the police on the floor of the house. When the government approached the family of the student with a cheque of ₹10 lakhs as compensation, the family refused to accept the cheque and instead demanded justice. So far no action whatsoever has been taken on the police officials responsible for the custodial murder.
The Dalit organizations in Parbhani district have started a long March for justice to Mumbai. Dalit and left organizations in Mumbai have come forward to organise support for the March when it arrives in Mumbai. The double standards in dealing with the injustices inflicted on the dalits are starkly evident in this BJP rule.
The situation is more or less the same in almost all the districts. Only the persona dramatis change!
While the Marathwada storms have not subsided a new storm is brewing in the parliamentary constituency of Eknath Shinde’s son. In a school run by owners affiliated to organizations in the RSS stable, 2 girls below the age of 4 were subjected to sexual assault by the accused Akshay Shinde a contractual housekeeping helper. He was arrested. There have been huge demonstrations in Badlapur including in the railway station against the school. The parents who protested were arrested and paraded with hands tied by rope by the police. The CCTV cameras required to be provided as per school regulations were not working. The police have not yet taken any action on the owners of the school.
Shinde was imprisoned in Taloja jail. A four year old case was opened up and the police took custody of Shinde to take him to the court. And then the police came out with news that Shinde tried to seize a revolver from the police and run away. The police fired in self defence with the bullet piercing his head. Almost all political parties welcomed this encounter killing as instant justice meted out to Shinde for his heinous crime. But there were several voices raised against the encounter killing and the parents of Shinde approached the court for justice which ordered for a magisterial report. The report was submitted to the court in a sealed envelope. The report has demolished the police theory and has recommended a trial of four police personnel accompanying Shinde. A fair trial was denied and the due process of law was not followed. The encounter killing had a backdrop of the assembly elections. With the killing of Shinde the possibilities of finding out the Truth in the matter has also been killed. But the owners of the school are free and the Mahayuti candidate has won the assembly election in Badlapur.
