Hyderabad: It is a kind of game of chess being played for the past few months. The chess-board is the state called Maharashtra and the players are Narendra Modi, Amit Shah on the one hand and Sharad Pawar on the other.
Ever since the Lok Sabha elections, the Modi-Shah were mainly targetting Nationalist Congress Party and Sharad Pawar in their campaign. In fact everybody kept on wondering why Modi is talking in his campaign more on Pawar rather than the Congress or its leaders.
Ahead of the assembly elections, the BJP's moves became more swift and aggressive. Many of the sitting and ex-MLAs of the NCP were offered tickets. Former ministers or senior leaders like Ganesh Naik, Sachin Ahir, Bhaskar Jadhav etc were made to defect. (It is another thing that, according to political convenience some of them went to BJP and others to Sena). Devendra Fadnavis used to mock Sharad Pawar that he has reduced to be like the Jailor in the Hindi film Sholay, who is left with nobody to back him. Fadnavis also used to say that Pawar's politics will be completely finished. Troubled by a lot of defections and the general feeling amongst the people and media that assembly elections are a cakewalk for the BJP, Pawar decided to fight back single-handedly.
Then came Amit Shah. He asked what has Pawar done for Maharashtra. Pawar answered back saying that he may or may not have contributed anything, but he (Pawar) has never gone to jail, for sure. This was a very hard blow to Amit Shah, who was externed from Gujarat by the Court during the number of court cases against him. So the next everybody heard was about the ED taking Sharad Pawar on its radar in the State Cooperative Bank corruption case. Around the same time, P. Chidambaram also faced certain ED enquiries and he tried to avoid going to jail. Shah perhaps felt that Pawar would do the same thing and he could mock Pawar on this.
But Pawar retaliated in his own way and upfront challenged the ED to call him for enquiry any time. In fact, he decided to present himself before the ED on his own, as he was quite sure that he can not be faulted for so-called corruption in a bank where he was never a member or a director. Pawar's action generated a lot of sympathies.
Then Pawar became very aggressive in his campaigning and said that he will not allow the BJP to form the government. His massive campaigning in the last leg of the elections changed the atmosphere to a large extent.
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The election results and Sena's stance of not supporting the BJP provided him with the greatest opportunity to settle the score with the BJP. He started enjoying his role as a king-maker. In one of the press conferences, he asked why Amit Shah has been silent in Maharashtra? “We are very keen to watch Amit Shah's famous Chanakya tactics in the state to enable the BJP to form the government,” Pawar said.
Neither Shah nor Modi or even J.P. Nadda reacted in any manner on the Maharashtra developments in all these past weeks. But their plans were afoot. And they were waiting to settle the score with Pawar. On Saturday, early in the morning, they did their supposedly final move.
But has Sharad Pawar been completely checkmated? You never know.
In his press conference in the afternoon, Sharad Pawar has said very emphatically that the Devendra government would not be able to prove their majority on the floor of the house on 30th November. This is a clear challenge thrown to Amit Shah. Will Pawar really be able to ensure the defeat of Devendra? No one can say for sure.
But one thing is clear, whatever may happen on 30th the game between Modi-Shah and Pawar would not be over.
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