Will the law ever catch up with Chhagan Bhujbal?
Is it “vendetta by the BJP” — as the Nationalist Congress Party claims — or a moment of joy for the Shiv Sena to see their bête noire behind bars? Chhagan Bhujbal’s Monday evening arrest by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in an alleged large-scale money laundering scam is sure to hold varied significance for various political parties in Maharashtra. If the BJP has shown that it isn’t willing to go soft on corruption and will not spare the others, for the NCP, it is a cause for greater worry thinking about what might come up next.
Its leaders Ajit Pawar and Sunil Tatkare have also been accused of alleged scams in the departments they held during the Congress-NCP regime in Maharashtra. Will they face a similar fate? But if there’s one party in the state that must have woken up to celebrations, it is the Shiv Sena, the BJP’s coalition partner in the government.
And they probably have reason to rejoice. After all, Bhujbal, the strongman from Nashik, was the only political leader in the state who had done what was then seen as an audacious move — he had got Bal Thackeray arrested in June 2000. With Bhujbal, a former Shiv Sainik, as the home minister, the Democratic Front government had given the Mumbai Police the sanction to prosecute Thackeray for inciting communal passions with his inflammatory articles during the 1993 riots in Mumbai. Despite his “warning, not a threat” that “Mumbai would burn”, the Shiv Sena supremo was arrested in a strategically planned move.
The DF government had first given the sanction for prosecution and then withdrawn police cover for hundreds of shakha and vibhag pramukhs (local leaders) of the Shiv Sena, sending them running for cover. The move had caused widespread panic — within the Thackeray household, the party and the city.
On July 25, 2,000 Mumbaikars stayed indoors in a self declared holiday to avoid trouble that was promising to brew on the roads; Shiv Sena members pelted stones and attacked public places while the party’s representatives in the state assembly put up a protest. But even as the magistrate’s court decided to terminate the legal proceedings against Thackeray, Chhagan Bhujbal emerged as a hero and the poster boy of the anti-Shiv Sena brigade. He was seen as the only state politician who had put the fiery Thackeray through an arrest and an appearance in court.
It was an episode that the Sena would never forget. Especially since, ironically, the orders from Bhujbal’s department had come on the eve of Guru Purnima. Thackeray had been the home minister’s mentor and guru during the many decades that he had spent in the Sena before quitting the party. If the high-profile matter catapulted Bhujbal’s stature in state politics, several other alleged wrongdoings that followed brought him infamy. The former Shiv Sena leader and Mumbai mayor found himself embroiled in multi-state Rs 1,000-crore stamp paper scam. Attention turned on Bhujbal after Abdul Karim Telgi, kingpin of the Rs 30,000-crore scam, named him for his role in the scam.
The NCP leader eventually emerged unscathed and was re-inducted to the Cabinet and given the cash-rich Public Works Department (PWD). It’s his role during in this department that has been under the scanner for the past two years. Last year, the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) of the Mumbai Police raided 16 properties belonging to the Bhujbal family and named him in varied corruption cases.
The former minister, his son and nephew have been named in a land grab case and the high-profile Maharashtra Sadan case, which brought him into the spotlight. It is said that in exchange for constructing the new state guest house in Delhi, the builder was allotted a plot of land in Mumbai and other transferable development rights worth thousands of crores.
It is alleged that members of his family also, interestingly, won the contract to supply furniture to the Maharashtra sadan. His sprawling Nashik, that reportedly covers 25 acres of prime land, his massive house in suburban Mumbai and the large tracts of land allotted to Bhujbal’s Maharashtra Education Trust, have come under the scanner. Last evening, after day long questioning at their Ballard Pier office, the ED arrested the Bhujbal in an alleged money laundering case, which is reported to have caused a loss of Rs 870 crore to the exchequer.
A newspaper report in Mumbai states that the politician, who has consistently projected himself as the leader of the state’s OBC community, used ambulances to ferry his cash to hawala gangs in West Bengal and then re-routed the money to his family’s accounts.
As the investigation continues and the Congress and the NCP joined hands in the Maharashtra Assembly today to condemn the “fascist government”, Bhujbal’s chequered public life will see another low point. His inspiring rise from a vegetable vendor in Mazgaon who battled poverty to study engineering at VJTI to the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra is marred by the string of alleged wrongdoings. The Shiv Sena probably just sees this as payback time.