Why Narendra Modi and Amit Shah can’t wish their Eknath Khadse problem away

On June 1, Eknath Khadse, a cabinet minister in Maharashtra and a powerful veteran leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the state, was sulking at his home in Muktainagar in Jalgaon district. As the state’s agriculture minister, he should have been cooperating with the central government team that began its tour of drought-affected areas of Marathwada and Vidarbha to assess damage to crops. But the unprecedented harsh drought and its searing impact on farmers and agriculture has been the farthest from Khadse’s attention this last week.

The 63-year-old politician and de facto number two in the state Cabinet, who holds a total of 10 portfolios, has been at the centre of grave allegations about corruption, impropriety and conflict of interest as well as questions about his connection to the underworld fugitive, Dawood Ibrahim. The allegations were serious enough for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah to take note. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis was asked to submit a report to Shah, which he did on Thursday. Modi is believed to have expressed his displeasure to Fadnavis in a separate meeting.

Sena vs Khadse

The charges against Khadse knock the bottom out of Modi’s oft-repeated assertion that his government has been free of corruption, and severely test his famous campaign line “Na khaoonga, na khane doonga”. The accusations against his Cabinet colleagues Sushma Swaraj and Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje raised questions about the Modi-Shah duo’s approach to the issue of impropriety and corruption – the cornerstones of the BJP’s 2014 general election campaign. Tongues wagged against other state leaders but they looked away.

On the second anniversary bash of the central government, Modi triumphantly repeated his achievement of a corruption-free government. No one dared to question him about Khadse against whom the allegations had already piled up. Since then, the stakes have been raised.

First, social activist, irrigation scam whistleblower and former Aam Aadmi Party leader Anjali Damania began her hunger strike demanding Khadse’s resignation, and a court-monitored investigation to be completed within six months.

Then, the BJP’s ally in government, the Shiv Sena, demanded that Khadse should resign on moral grounds because the party’s claim of non-corrupt government was on trial and the yardstick used during the Congress government – of a minister or chief minister under a cloud of allegation resigning – should not be changed for Khadse.

State BJP leaders have retorted that the Sena should “mind its own business”. It is possible that the Sena is twisting in the knife to get back at Khadse, who formally declared that the BJP-Sena alliance of 25 years had been broken in September 2014, and who was also in favour of limiting the Sena’s role and participation in the Maharashtra government.

Allegations against Khadse

The mainstream media that extended the honeymoon period for Fadnavis, especially a section of the local Marathi media, has kept at the Khadse story piling up the pressure on Fadnavis to take action.

But Khadse is not a national embarrassment for the BJP yet in the way that Swaraj or Raje were because news channels have either skirted around the story or not turned it into a high-pitched sustained operation in a manner that, for example, former chief minister Ashok Chavan’s involvement in the Adarsh Society scam was.

But what are the allegations against Khadse? At this time, there are four major ones.

1. Khadse’s wife Mandakini and son-in-law Girish Chaudhri bought a three-acre plot in an industrial complex at Bhosari near Pune at a fraction of the market price. Khadse’s family paid Rs 3.75 crore for the land, which according to government ready reckoner rates, is priced at around Rs 31 crore. They claim to have bought it from its original owner, Abbas Ukani, but the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation has questioned this given its proprietorship of the land.
2. Khadse has refuted the state’s industry minister, Shiv Sena’s Subhash Desai statement that the Bhosari land belonged to the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation on the grounds that the state corporation did not pay Ukani the full value of the land and therefore it continued to belong to Ukani. The point to note here is that there is a police complaint about the transaction filed by a Pune-based builder Hemant Gawande, who alleged that Khadse had misused his authority as minister to effect the land deal, which was done on April 27-28.
3. In May, the Anti-Corruption Bureau arrested Gajanan Patil – a BJP local leader from Jalgaon who is known to be a close aide of Khadse’s – from the state government building. Patil was arrested for demanding a Rs 30 crore bribe to transfer a plot of land in Thane near Mumbai. The revenue department is one of the 10 departments that Khadse helms. Khadse said then that he had no connection with Patil and why would anyone demand or pay a Rs 30 crore bribe for land worth Rs 5 crore. However, Congress leaders allege that the market rate of the Thane plot is in the region of Rs 225 crore.
4. Khadse has close and dubious links with firms and contractors who bagged irrigation contracts, according to Damania. Khadse’s wife and other family members are directors of sugar factories owned or co-owned by the firms that got irrigation contracts from the Tapi Valley Irrigation Development Corporation in north Maharashtra that includes Khadse’s home district, Jalgaon. 
5. Between September 5, 2015, and April 5, 2016, a mobile number that Khadse was using had received calls from Mehjabeen Shaikh, Dawood Ibrahim’s wife, from Karachi, alleged Manish Bhangale, who claimed to be an ethical hacker. Bhangale said that he had come across this information while hacking into a Pakistani telecom firm’s site. He had approached court demanding a thorough probe. The state police though has found nothing suspicious enough to investigate, perhaps accepting Khadse’s defence that he was “not using” the mobile phone number when these calls were made.

The suspicious calls can be explained away. The relationship with Patil can be negated. But the allegations of misusing authority, nepotism, conflict of interest involving family members in deals and firms that indirectly fall under one or the other ministry he heads will stick, and cannot be clarified as easily. Khadse’s best defence is that he did not take direct decisions that evoked the conflict-of-interest principle as Chavan had done with respect to Adarsh Society. But this line may not absolve him.

More importantly, irrespective of his explanations, the controversies damage the carefully-built perception that the Modi and Fadnavis governments are not tainted. Modi and Shah may decide to allow Fadnavis to brazen out the scandal and shield Khadse till the storm blows over. This has been their default strategy in all previous controversies, such as in the Swaraj and Raje cases, though the allegations are serious enough for Khadse to step down. Typically, he said he would resign if party leaders want him to do so.

The decision to axe Khadse from the state cabinet is, in any case, a complicated one. If he is shown the door, it strengthens the Sena and it supports the view that Modi and Fadnavis allowed allegedly corrupt and suspect senior leaders under their watch till the scandal blew up in their faces. If his portfolios and position in the government are pared down, it risks annoying his supporters and upsetting his enviable political capital which helped propel the BJP into the top position in the 2014 general and Assembly elections.

Khadse is, as the euphemistic description goes, a political heavy-weight. Hailing from the Leva Patil community, he has positioned himself as an OBC leader especially after Gopinath Munde’s demise. Khadse’s footprint across Maharashtra is now unparalleled and he is widely acknowledged as the leader of masses and rural Maharashtra. His clout in north Maharashtra is impressive. The BJP needs Khadse and his political acumen in the Maharashtra legislative council election next week, and for the zilla parishad polls in the coming months.

Khadse vs Fadnavis

There is another intertwined strand at work here. Khadse, as the leader of the Opposition in the previous Assembly, took on the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party government for its misdemeanours and transgressions. He believed, rightly so, that if the BJP led the next government, he would be the natural choice for chief minister, given that Munde had tragically passed away by then. However, the Modi-Shah duo chose Fadnavis, Khadse’s junior colleague with relatively lesser pan-Maharashtra political profile, to head the state government. Khadse has let it be known that Fadnavis got the top job thanks to his being a Brahmin, and his proximity to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Khadse and Fadnavis have never been comfortable with one another despite their public postures.

Khadse activated his vast support base this week to send a message out to Fadnavis as well as to Modi-Shah. His supporters organised demonstrations, and banners in his support were put up in Jalgaon. Khadse paid tributes to Munde on the latter’s death anniversary without mentioning the BJP or displaying the party symbol anywhere on banners, and has let it be known that the party cannot push him around. He even refused to attend the state Cabinet meeting this week, never mind the severe drought conditions.

Though his irritation with Khadse is known, Fadnavis is ill-placed to decide on the action against his senior colleague. Modi and Shah cannot risk upsetting the cart in Maharashtra but their decision will be driven by the price they will have to pay for keeping Khadse in government – the blemish of shielding the corrupt. Can they afford it? As the Shiv Sena has been gratuitously reminding Modi, they cannot target Robert Vadra for dubious land deals but allow their own to go scot-free. This is a tough call that Modi and Shah have to make.