How Dilip Vengsarkar got Sharad Pawar disqualified from MCA elections

What’s in an address? Whether NCP president Sharad Pawar’s permanent residence is in Baramati or Mumbai, it should hardly make any difference to his political career. But the cricket pitch is different from that of politics, and Pawar learnt that the hard way.

The shrewd Maratha leader who had over decades mastered the reverse swing to force his friends and foes alike on the back foot was strangely clean bowled on his home ground that is Mumbai — or is it? The question arises as former cricketer Dilip Vengsarkar, who has the backing of the Shiv Sena, recently managed to ensure that Pawar was disqualified from the Mumbai Cricket Association (MCA) elections because of his failure to produce proof of permanent residence in the city.

This instance, however, has implications that, like Pawar’s life itself, straddle the realms of cricket and politics. It makes us think back on the time when Manmohan Singh and the Congress manipulated the system and showed his permanent address to be in Assam to ensure he got a Rajya Sabha seat from the state. The fact is he had never owned any home in the north-eastern state nor served it to establish a reasonably long stay to qualify as a resident. Singh was born in Gah village (now in Pakistan) and was later a resident of Delhi. Yet the central leadership of the Congress exploited systemic loopholes and paved the way for him to become not only the leader of the house of elders but also the prime minister of the country.

It is ironical that manipulations of Singh’s permanent address are casually dismissed as the result of political compulsions while Pawar, who even owns a house in Mumbai, is thrown out of the cricket contest for want of a permanent residence. One wonders why the man whose middle name is honesty did not refuse to resort to ‘wrong’ measures to get that Rajya Sabha seat. There are no simple answers but, as they say, all is fair in love, war, and politics.

Coming back to cricket, Pawar got his act together quickly and propped up his Congress rival, Vilasrao Deshmukh, for the presidential post. After all, he reckons there are no permanent friends or foes in politics. In 1999, it was he who had consented to Deshmukh’s rise to the chief ministerial chair despite fighting the assembly elections against the Congress.

While admitting that his disqualification has been a setback, his friends and MCA voters exude confidence in his leadership. His associates maintain that he is still leading from the front. Some even argue that, had he wanted, he could have postponed the elections and amended the rules. But that would have invited a lot of backlash from the Vengsarkar camp. The Pawar camp, secure in the knowledge that the NCP chief is calling the shots, has reconciled to Deshmukh as the presidential candidate, arguing: “After all, what’s in a name?”