Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Pankaja Munde, who is the party’s national secretary, on Tuesday indicated she would soon re-enter the political arena while remarking that that the people of Maharashtra had lost the “capacity to face disappointment.”
Addressing a massive audience during her annual Dussehra rally in Beed district, Ms. Munde, a former Maharashtra Minister who has been estranged from the BJP top brass, said she would never compromise her principles for the sake of electoral victory.
In a typically ambivalent speech laced with veiled jibes at the ruling parties (her own BJP, the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and the Ajit Pawar-led NCP faction), Ms. Munde, the daughter of late BJP stalwart Gopinath Munde, warned that “characterless politicians” would be outvoted by the people in the 2024 elections.
“I will work to defeat those who are not competent to take the state forward, who are characterless and who make use of money power,” she said.
Ms. Munde thanked the people for the overwhelming response she claimed to have received during her recently concluded ‘Shiv Shakti Yatra’ - an ostensibly non-political event meant to address social issues from which Maharashtra BJP leaders had nonetheless distanced themselves.
“Are farmers happy today? Are they receiving crop insurance and government aid? Sugarcane cutters will not work if their wages are not increased. If I do not secure justice for them, I will not show my face at the next Dussehra rally,” she said, in a jibe at the Shinde government while speaking on the plight of sugarcane cutters, many of whom hail from Beed and the Marathwada region.
“The State is facing many serious problems today. The Marathas are demanding reservation. The OBC community is looking at the State government with great expectations. The people have lost the capacity to face disappointment now,” said Ms. Munde.
The BJP leader, who in July had said she would be taking a break from the hurly-burly of politics in order to “introspect”, said in her address that she would soon be re-entering the political battlefield.
“Now I will take to the political battlefield to defeat others. My supporters will no longer observe self-restraint,” warned Ms. Munde.
“The people collected ₹11 crores for me in two days when my sugar mill was raided. I will not take the money but I will take the blessings of the people who contributed,” she said, alluding to the raid on her sugar factory by the Goods and Services Tax (GST) department for alleged tax evasion earlier this year.
The GST’s raid on Ms. Munde’s Vaidyanath Sugar Factory in Parli on September 24 was the second such raid this year, following a similar shake-up in April. Authorities had seized assets worth ₹19 crores from Ms. Munde’s factory.
The timing of the raid, which had coincided with Ms. Munde’s ‘Shiv Shakti yatra’ across the State, was significant.
Ms. Munde’s relations with the top BJP brass since the passing of her father Gopinath Munde (in June 2014) have been frigid. Her relations with current Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis have been especially fraught, with the two rarely sharing a dais during any programme.
In the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly election, Ms. Munde had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of her estranged cousin, the Nationalist Congress Party’s Dhananjay Munde from the Munde’s bastion in Parli (in Beed).
It is said the reason for Ms. Munde’s disgruntlement was due to current Deputy Chief Minister (and then Chief Minister) Devendra Fadnavis’ ‘authoritarian style’ of running the BJP and eliminating his potential ‘rivals’ in a Machiavellian fashion.
In July this year, Ms. Munde had refuted wild speculation of her having met Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi in Delhi, stating that “betrayal does not run in my blood.”
