Many perceptions about Sharad Pawar

There is a perception in Mumbai that Sharad Pawar controls DB Realty and has close links with its boss Shahid Balwa and co-promoter Vinod Goenka, corporate lobbyist Nira Radia reportedly told the CBI team investigating the 2G spectrum scam recently.

Perception is a strange word. It protects and damages both the person who has used it and the person against whom it has been used. It’s the word that Radia reportedly chose to describe how she sees Pawar.

One remembers how Outlook magazine, in its first few issues, described Pawar as man who owns several hundreds crores and then had to eat humble pie after Pawar sued the magazine.

Former deputy municipal commissioner GR Khairnar repeatedly claimed he will provide ample proof against Pawar about his alleged Dawood claims, but could give none.

BJP leader Gopinath Munde showed that Pawar had ferried in his defence plane the Sharma brothers who were allegedly involved in the sensational JJ hospital killings. It later emerged that when they travelled with Pawar, not a single case was registered against them.

There have been a slew of allegations against Pawar — land scams, Enron, Lavasa, IPL and now 2G, and yet hardly any has stuck. But the perception refuses to go. Why?

The answer, say his friends-turned-foes, lies in the company he keeps. There was a time when Pawar had friends from the worlds of literature, performing art, social justice, law, and medicine. But as time flew by, he acquired other friends, who grew closer to him and not all were clean as a whistle.

There were two turning points in Pawar’s life, say his friends. One was when he met the then Mumbai Congress chief, Rajni Patel, in 1969, and realised how important was the marriage of the corporate world and politics. It influenced him so much that Pawar reportedly told his close aides that the reason his political mentor, Yashwantrao Chavan, never became prime minister was because he didn’t have the money.

The second was when he decided to try his luck in Delhi. He was convinced he needed influential friends in fields other than what he had in Maharasthra. So he became friends with a series of seths with huge purses.

His politics in the state still revolves around his loyalists. It’s another issue that they kept changing as Pawar’s (and his loyalists’) needs changed. They veered away from him inexplicably or stuck with him as there was no option.

At the same time, there is also a Pawar who is (or was) one of the best administrators, who is strongly secular (even though he is friends with Bal Thackeray and won’t hesitate to ally with the BJP), who decided not have any more kids after his daughter was born, who renamed Marathwada University after Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar despite knowing that there would be a political price, who got the stock markets up and running within two days of the 1993 serial blasts, and who transformed the face of agriculture when he tied the state employment guarantee scheme to horticulture…

So who is the real Pawar? You decide. It’s your perception.