NAGPUR, January 15: The Bharatiya Janata party is playing it safe in its seat allocations in Maharashtra's Vidarbha constituencies. The nomination of its candidates clearly shows that the party does not want to meddle with the formulae which had given it surprising victories in the 1996 Lok Sabha elections.In its poll alliance with the Shiv Sena, the BJP gets seven of the 11 Lok Sabha seats in Vidarbha region. These are the constituencies of Nagpur, Wardha, Bhandara, Chimur, Chandrapur, Akola and Yavatmal.
The party won six of these seven seats and has re-nominated four of the sitting MPs, most of whom put up an unimpressive performance. The only sitting MP to be replaced was Banwarilal Purohit at Nagpur. The nominee at the Yavatmal seat is yet to be announced.
It is also very clear that the Pramod Mahajan-Gopinath Munde group in the BJP determined the seat allotments. No panel of names came up before the party leadership to make a choice. For each of the seats, a single name was suggested and
approved.
The decision to remove Purohit at Nagpur has become the topic of discussion, drawing attention away from the fact that elsewhere the BJP has given prime importance to the caste factor.
At Wardha, for example, Vijay Mude has been re-nominated despite a dismal performance at MP in the House as well as in the constituency. There were quite a few BJP workers who had demanded that he be replaced. The leadership, however, appears to have retained him to counter the strong challenge from Congress candidate Datta Meghe who represented the Ramtek constituency last time.
The political rivalry between Kunbi and Teli communities in Wardha is well known. Meghe can be relied upon to sway the Kunbi votes in his favour, as had Mude in the last election when he defeated Vasant Sathe (Cong) and Ramchandra Ghangare (CPM). Nobody, not even the BJP workers, had really expected Mude to pull it off. But in the absence of an overpowering election issue, the caste factor worked in his favour, what with sitting MP
Ghangare being a Teli.
This time again, there is no such issue to overshadow caste considerations.Congress candidate Vilas Muttemwar's defeat at the hands of a little-known Namdeorao Diwte (BJP) in the Chimur constituency last time was also owing to caste equations. Muttemwar had no caste votes here, whereas Diwte sailed through with the help of a Kunbi-Gowari-Mana combination. Diwte belongs to the Kunbi community while the Gowari-Mana support came to the BJP by wooing leaders of this community after the Gowari stampede deaths during Congress rule.
BJP leaders hope that this combination will continue to work in Diwte's favour. Vilas Muttemwar, on the other hand, is eyeing the Nagpur seat this time and the Congress has handed over the ticket to the Republican party of India (RPI) in its seat-sharing arrangement.
At Chandrapur, BJP nominee Hansraj Ahir cashed in on the non-Teli unity to emerge victorious in 1996. Non-Teli communities put their combined strength behind him that time to pull down Shantaram
Potdukhe, a Teli who was looking for his fifth running term.
Another factor which could have gone in Ahir's favour is that he kept mum in the controversy over the Bhadravati mining land deal, when Nagpur MP Banwarilal Purohit flung mud on his own party's government for and BJP national general secretary Pramod Mahajan for irregularities. Bhadravati falls in Ahir's constituency but the MP faithfully toed the Mahajan-Munde line all along.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
