The Centre is due to take a decision soon on a proposal to rename 13 airports in the country, including Maharashtra’s Aurangabad airport as ‘Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj Airport’, said Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and Union Minister of State (MoS) for Finance Bhagwat Karad.
Dr. Karad, a Rajya Sabha MP, said besides the Aurangabad airport, the Shirdi airport in Ahmednagar district is proposed to be renamed as ‘Sai Baba airport’ and the one in Kolhapur district as ‘Mahalakshmi airport’.
“A decision in this regard is likely to be taken in the next Cabinet meeting. Minister of Civil Aviation Jyotiraditya Scindia will soon submit a joint proposal to the Cabinet in this regard. The Centre order [on the name change of the airports] will soon be coming,” he informed. He added there was a demand from people’s representatives for the renaming of Aurangabad airport.
Nearly two years ago, Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray had put forward a proposal in the Maharashtra Assembly to change the name of Aurangabad Airport to ‘Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj Airport’.
Political connotations
As the civic polls draw near, the renaming of Aurangabad airport has always been fraught with political connotations.
The Shiv Sena is the single-largest party with 30 seats in the 112-seat Aurangabad Municipal Corporation (AMC). Following the 2015 AMC election, an alliance of the Sena and the BJP had led to the former installing its candidate as the Mayor.
Now, with a bitter split between the two erstwhile allies and the Sena allying with the ideologically opposed Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), the stakes for the AMC have never been higher.
In fact, the installation of Dr. Karad – a former two-time BJP Mayor of Aurangabad – as an MoS is a strong indication that the BJP means business in the upcoming AMC contest.
The Aurangabad civic body polls were due in April 2020 but had to be postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The polls are now to be held later this year along with the Pune, Pimpri-Chinchwad, Mumbai, Solapur and other civic body elections.
According to observers, the BJP-led Centre’s decision to rename Aurangabad airport was possibly an attempt to steal a march on its estranged ally, the Shiv Sena.
The Sena, under its late founder Bal Thackeray, had been gunning for Aurangabad to be renamed ‘Sambhajinagar’ (after Chhatrapati Sambhaji – Shivaji’s son and successor) since the late 1980s when the party was seeking to expand its influence beyond Mumbai city and the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR).
Aurangabad which was originally a petty hamlet named Khirki, was built by Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb on the foundations originally laid by the remarkable Abyssinian warlord Malik Ambar – who was Prime Minister of the Deccani Nizamshahi dynasty - in the early 1600s. The city was later built by Aurangzeb in the 1650s to commemorate his first Viceroyalty of the Deccan. Later, during the wars, Aurangzeb eventually captured and killed Sambhaji in 1689 CE.
Major rift
The Shiv Sena, in a bid to consolidate the Hindu vote-bank in Aurangabad and efface Aurangzeb’s link to the city, has been relentlessly pursuing the ‘name change’ stratagem. So much so, the issue has been the cause of a major rift between the Sena and its current ally, the Congress, which is resolutely opposed to the name change.
Ever since the Sena formed the Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition with the NCP and the Congress, the BJP has never lost an opportunity in taunting the former over its ‘Hindutva’ credentials, particularly over the Sena’s delay to officially rename ‘Aurangabad’ to ‘Sambhajinagar’.
