Monday Musings: Sharad Pawar’s consistent support to industrialists

Industrialist Rahul Bajaj during a programme in Mumbai to celebrate Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) president Sharad Pawar’s 75th birthday in 2015 said, he would like to see the septuagenarian politician as the next president of India. Bajaj passed away two years back and his dream of seeing Pawar as a president remained unfulfilled, but the remarks underlined the proximity the two shared.

Bajaj wasn’t the only politician Pawar had a close relationship with. In his Marathi autobiography ‘Lok Maze Saangati’, Pawar has elaborately mentioned his ties and his approach towards industrialists including Gautam Adani.

Politically, Pawar took a different stand, breaking ranks with opposition parties that were united in targeting the Narendra Modi-led government. However, he has been consistent if one looks at his association with Gautam Adani. In the book released in 2015, the NCP chief heaped praise on Adani while describing him as a “hard-working, simple, down-to-earth” person.

Pawar wrote how Adani created a big empire from scratch starting as a salesman in Mumbai locals, dabbling in small ventures before trying his luck in the diamond industry.

“I know this industrialist for a long time. He is extremely hardworking and a down-to-earth man,” Pawar wrote in the book.

This explains his latest remarks about the investigation into charges made against the Adani Group by the short-selling firm Hindenburg Research.

During a second stint of UPA, the then minister of environment and forests Jairam Ramesh had cancelled the allocation of coal blocks, crucial for Adani Group which came up with a power plant at Gondia. The decision was prompted by concerns raised by environmentalists citing a threat to tiger conservation.

The NCP chief countered the stance of environmentalists that the mine would harm the tiger habitat by saying that the blocks were quite far from the forest.

Interestingly, Adani’s power plant at Gondia had come up at the request of Pawar himself.

Pawar was then the Union Agriculture Minister in Manmohan Singh-led cabinet. At a programme to mark the death anniversary of his party colleague Praful Patel’s father at Gondia, Pawar urged Adani to set up a power generation plant.

“Gautam accepted my suggestion. Usually, nothing much happens on statements made from the podium, but Gautam pursued the matter and established a 3,000 MW thermal power plant in Bhandara,” Pawar recounted in his autobiography.

Pawar has always been pro-business from the beginning as he firmly believed it will lead to industrial development and create employment in the state. His association with business also invited flak.

In 2010, Pawar famously remarked that Maharashtra should imitate Gujarat for successfully executing developmental projects, some of which were facing protests from various organisations in the state. Pawar was bitter about opposition by activists and media to the Lavala project then. However, without naming Lavasa, Pawar had said the government, opposition and media - all together encouraged the development in Gujarat, and he believes Maharashtra should follow the same path.

While Pawar has been consistent through his latest stand on the Adani Group, it has politically helped Modi, whom the NCP chief has bailed out on many previous occasions. On multiple occasions, Pawar has charted a different course than the Congress on issues that politically helped BJP and Modi.

During the heat of the campaign in 2014, Pawar stood by Modi on the row over the 2002 Gujrat riots. Pawar had said it would be wrong to blame the Gujarat CM for the riots as the Supreme Court had given him a clean chit. A year later, Modi during his Pune tour, called Pawar one of the most admired politicians. Modi didn’t stop there saying, it was Pawar who hand-held him into politics during his early days in Gujarat.