Why BJP’s Pankaja Munde is on a yatra across Maharashtra

With just months to go for the Lok Sabha and Maharashtra assembly elections, senior BJP leader and former minister Pankaja Munde has launched a statewide ‘Shiv Shakti Yatra’. Pankaja, who is reported to be upset at her gradual marginalisation in the party, will visit pilgrimage centres as part of this tour, which is also being positioned as a show of strength.

Pankaja launched her yatra on September 4 from the Grushneshwar temple in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar (Aurangabad) district, which is a jyotirlinga of Lord Shiva. She will cover temples and shrines like the Triambakeshwar jyotirlinga (Nashik), Bhimashankar jyotirlinga and Jejuri (Pune), Shikhar Shingnapur (Satara), Mahalaxmi/ Ambabai (Kolhapur), Pandharpur and Akkalkot (Solapur), Gangapura (Kalaburagi in Karnataka), Tuljapur in Osmanabad, Aundha Nagnath jyotirlinga (Hingoli) and Vaidyanath jyotirlinga (Beed). Pankaja will also attend the jayanti celebrations of Sant Bhagwanbaba aka Bhagwan Maharaj Gadkari, a bhakti saint from the Vanjari community, which she belongs to. The yatra will culminate on September 11 in her home district of Beed.

During the tour, which is gradually emerging as a mass contact programme, Pankaja, who is one of the most popular Other Backward Classes (OBC) leaders in Maharashtra and the legatee of late BJP leader Gopinath Munde, has been welcomed by massive crowds. She has made political statements like supporting India’s name change to Bharat and, when asked about the demand by her workers for her to take a new path, said “this is a new path, of god, of god’s worship”.

While the tour is taking place in the backdrop of Pankaja reportedly being upset in the BJP, Omprakash (Bacchu) Kadu, a four-term MLA from Acchalpur in Amravati district, has created ripples by claiming he was willing to ally with Pankaja if she enjoyed the backing of 10-15 legislators. Kadu’s Prahaar Janashakti party has two MLAs in Maharashtra. Kadu was a minister of state in the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) regime. He supported the rebellion by Eknath Shinde last year, but after Shinde came to power in alliance with the BJP, Kadu was not accommodated in the cabinet, leaving him upset.

Pankaja is said to be disgruntled at being gradually marginalised in the party after her shock defeat to estranged cousin and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Dhananjay Munde in the 2019 assembly polls from Parli in Beed district. Contrary to expectations, she was not accommodated in the state legislative council, and the BJP instead tried to promote a new crop of leaders from the Vanjari caste, such as Union minister of state for finance Dr Bhagwat Karad and Ramesh Karad from Latur. Pankaja’s sister Dr Pritam Munde, who is a second-term Lok Sabha MP from Beed, was also not accommodated in the Union council of ministers.

In January, Pankaja was not invited for a public meeting addressed by BJP president J.P. Nadda in Aurangabad. She, however, attended it and was asked to speak for just two minutes. In April, the Vaidyanath sugar factory controlled by the Mundes was raided for alleged Goods and Services Tax (GST) evasion.

Pankaja, who is national secretary in the BJP, later made statements that indicated she was not too happy at the state of affairs. “How is it my party? I belong to the BJP, but the BJP does not belong to me,” she said at a public meeting organised by BJP ally Rashtriya Samaj Party (RSP). Later, in an event to mark her father’s death anniversary on June 3, Pankaja pointed out that those who had lost the elections had been accommodated while she had been left out. “My leader is (Union home minister) Amit Shah. I will meet him and have a free-wheeling discussion,” she said, bypassing state heavyweights like deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis while referring to Shah as her leader.

These statements had led to leaders from the Congress and chief minister Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena inviting her to join them. Later, Pankaja said she was taking a two-month hiatus from politics.

Dhananjay’s decision to shift loyalties to the rebel NCP faction led by deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar and his inclusion in the state cabinet as agriculture minister may also have complicated matters for Pankaja. It is speculated that she may instead contest from Pathardi in neighbouring Ahmednagar district in the 2024 state election.

Pankaja’s yatra brings back memories of a similar mass outreach by Gopinath Munde. In 1994, Munde, who was the BJP’s tallest OBC leader with a strong base in his influential Vanjari community, had launched the ‘Sangharsh Yatra’ across Maharashtra and taken then chief minister Sharad Pawar and the Congress head on. The assembly polls next year saw the Shiv Sena and BJP come to power in Maharashtra, and he became deputy chief minister and home minister.

The ‘Sangharsh Yatra’ was hailed as one the reasons for the first non-Congress government taking charge in the state, the others being the image of late Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray as a firebrand Hindutva leader, the 1992-93 communal riots in Mumbai, the aggressive posturing of Bal Thackeray’s nephew Raj Thackeray, who then headed the party’s youth wing, and the allegations made against Pawar including his purported links with the Mumbai underworld.

The brother-in-law of senior BJP leader Pramod Mahajan, Munde was the BJP’ tallest leader in Maharashtra and the man who transformed a party largely seen as one representing the interests of Savarna groups like Brahmins and Banias to a mass-based one. Munde was the part of a generation of OBC leaders groomed by the BJP’s organising secretary Vasantrao Bhagwat, which helped the party strike roots in backward groups like Malis, Dhangars and Vanjaris. His base went beyond his Vanjari community, which has sizeable pockets in regions like Marathwada, Vidarbha and western Maharashtra, and he also commanded the loyalty of other OBC groups and even upper-castes like Marathas and Brahmins.

Incidentally, Munde, who was at the receiving end of factionalism in the Maharashtra BJP, is said to have tried to join the Congress during the second term of the Manmohan Singh-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, but the plan fell through at the last minute. Munde, who was deputy chief minister of Maharashtra from 1995 to 1999, was elected to the Lok Sabha from Beed in 2009 and 2014. He was sworn in as the Union minister for rural development in the Narendra Modi regime but passed away just days later in a road mishap.

Pankaja’s supporters expected that after her father’s death, she would be appointed as the chief minister of Maharashtra after the BJP came to power in the state in 2014. However, the mantle was given to Devendra Fadnavis, a Brahmin. At that time, Pankaja said she was the “chief minister in the hearts of the people”.

As the minister for rural development and women and child development, Pankaja’s tenure saw controversies and allegations of irregularities. Her shock defeat in 2019 at the hands of her estranged cousin was also claimed to be an inside job. Dhananjay, who left the BJP for the NCP after a feud with his uncle, is close to Fadnavis since his days in the party.

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