Will Maharashtra forgive Sharad Pawar?

How come it is Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar’s family once again which is accused of a nexus with a controversial builder, the jailed ex-managing director of DB Realty, Shahid Balwa?

A prominent suspect in the 2G spectrum scam, Balwa’s arrest in February led to a prompt clarification from Pawar that he did not know this man, although he knew the family of Balwa’s business partner and DB Realty chairman, Vinod Goenka, well.

Pawar and his acolytes explained that the Dynamix Dairy (now the Schreiber Dynamix Dairy Industries) in Baramati had started as a Goenka enterprise and had nothing to do with Balwa. Then came the revelation from Maharashtra’s leader of opposition, Eknath Khadse, that Pawar was one of the eight passengers along with Balwa and Goenka in a plane owned by Balwa’s Eon Aviation during a flight to Dubai in February 2010. Maybe so, said Pawar’s spokesperson, Jitendra Avhad, while stating emphatically that this did not prove Pawar’s links with Balwa.

Yet another revelation followed about DB Realty’s controversial, mega-commercial project in Yerawada, Pune, being constructed on the same survey number (191A) where Pawar’s family friend, Atul Chordia, had constructed the Panchshil Tech Park. Khadse alleged that it was Balwa who had applied for environmental clearance for the two projects, a charge that Chordia refuted. Coincidentally, Chordia’s Panchshil Pvt Ltd has Pawar’s daughter, Supriya Sule, and her husband Sadanand as investors.

Balwa’s Yerawada construction caught attention also because the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP)-led state home department had entered into an agreement with DB Realty to hand over a 3-acre plot of the Yerawada police station for “re-development”. This was despite protests from the Pune police department. It was only after Balwa’s arrest that an embarrassed Congress-NCP government agreed to review the decision. Is the Pawar family obsessed with lucrative real estate projects in the Pune-Mumbai belt?

The Lavasa story is all familiar. As revealed by Pawar in an exclusive interview to DNA, it was he who selected the site for the Lavasa Lake City in Pune district. A company called Pearly Blue Lake Resorts Pvt Ltd was then floated by his well-known associate and builder, Aniruddha Deshpande, to take the project forward. While the Pawar family has shares in Deshpande’s City Corporation Ltd  — the same firm that had made a controversial IPL bid — Pawar’s daughter and son-in-law were prominent shareholders in Ajit Gulabchand’s Lavasa Corporation which took over the project from Deshpande.

Chordia’s Panchshil Realty, Deshpande’s City Corporation and Gulabchand’s Lavasa Corporation are the three firms engaged in mega real estate projects where the Pawar family’s links have been exposed. Will more surprises tumble out in the future? It is sad that Pawar is no longer the darling of the masses in Maharashtra that he once was. His controversial connections have taken a toll on his image and reputation.

Almost forgotten are his achievements as a progressive leader and as the youngest chief minister of Maharashtra who went on to serve four terms. His massive victory margins in election after election over the last four decades in politics are no longer awe-inspiring because his personality no longer inspires. Maharashtra’s human development index, too, is down in the dumps, bringing no credit to him and his government’s leadership. Is this the same Sharad Pawar that we once knew?