Why Chavan and Pawar's MCA dreams are not about cricket

Ashish Magotra and Kavitha Iyer A trivia question for all you cricket buffs. When was the last time a cricketer was elected president of the Mumbai Cricket Association? The previous president was the late Vilasrao Deshmukh, before that we had Sharad Pawar and he had taken over from Manohar Joshi. None of the three played much cricket. The last cricketer to become president of the MCA was Madhav Mantri, Sunil Gavaskar’s uncle, who reigned from 1987-88 to 1992. From then on, it has been a post that has been coveted by politicians for a variety of reasons. The politics-cricket marriage is an old one. Before Mantri, another politician S K Wankhede was the president from 1963-64 to 86-87 and the same is true of most associations around the country. In fact, when the latest season of IPL controversies was playing out, the most hilarious parts of the tragicomedy were the calls to disentangle politics and cricket, as if that were even remotely possible. [caption id=“attachment_1119985” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The politics-cricket marriage is an old one. PIB India[/caption] For the uninitiated, Narendra Modi, BJP-appointed PM-in-waiting, is president of the Gujarat Cricket Association. Farooq Abdullah, the late Madhavrao Scindia, Arun Jaitley, Rajeev Shukla – the list of politicians who believe they have a role to play in administering a national obsession is a long one. Go back farther in history, all the way back to Parsi clubs formed in the last century, and it is already well established that cricket is often a deeply political game in India. So, what’s in it for busy politicians? Love for the game and a commitment to see it better administered? Erm, okay. Glamour, certainly. Money, of course, despite all the posts being honorary. The ego boost, yes. Money draws politics, and cricket means big bucks – the Rs ,3,800 crore paid to BCCI by Star for telecast rights of matches until 2018 is only one example. Which is why whether we like it or not, we are stuck with the inseparable threesome – cricket, corruption and politics. But the Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan hardly fits into any of these equations – he has in fact fought hard to keep a squeaky clean record, and he’s no glamour-hungry middle-level politician. Which brings us to the conclusion that his entry into the Mumbai Cricket Association is a purely political contest, one with tremendous implications for Maharashtra. At this stage, Chavan has not really decided whether he will really throw his hat in the ring – in fact, it will hardly be his choice since either victory or defeat will have a direct impact on Maharashtra’s coalition government and the coalition’s prospects in 2014. According to sources, he did get a go-ahead from Congress chief Sonia Gandhi before he agreed to represent Mazgaon Cricket Club. If he eventually contests, he does so as chief minister. The natural corollary is that he would do so only if he’s assured of winning – a setback would be an embarrassment to the chief minister, and also to the party. And if he does win, it would be a slap in the face to NCP chief Sharad Pawar and to the NCP. This will only cause further bitterness in a coalition already famous for internal animosities and the likelihood of the NCP hitting back at the Congress in some way, at a time when the primary concern for the UPA would be to take all allies together to take on the BJP, NDA and Modi. Pawar has the clear advantage – he declared his intentions a long time ago and one imagines he would have by now tied up with clubs for their votes. He has done this before too. He knows the ropes and the many pitfalls that await. But even a seasoned cricket administrator may not understand the politics of the cricket completely – Pawar has only ever lost one election, the 2004 BCCI election where he was contesting for the president’s post. He was beaten 16-15 to the post of BCCI president by Haryana Cricket Association Secretary and BCCI Vice-President Ranbir Singh Mahendra, who had the backing of Jagmohan Dalmiya (who was then the BCCI president). He came back the next year but the manner of the defeat rankled. Without Dalmiya, the results would have read 15-12 to Pawar. However, Dalmiya first voted as the president of the Cricket Association of Bengal and the National Cricket Club, one of the three non-Ranji playing units that have a voting right. Then he cast what is called the chairman’s vote, the vote he enjoyed in his capacity as BCCI president. And finally with the tally tied at 15-15, Dalmiya exercised his right to break the deadlock with the casting vote. Pawar was basically stumped off a no-ball by Dalmiya. Then again Pawar, who was president from 2001-02 to 2010-11, had originally intended to seek re-election in 2011 but his nomination had to be withdrawn once it was discovered that he did not satisfy the association’s residential requirement. Clause 17 of the MCA constitution states that only a resident of Mumbai or Thane is eligible to be MCA president. During the last national election in 2009, Pawar, who is also India’s agriculture minister, had declared his residence to be Baramati, a district in Maharashtra. However, earlier this year, Pawar changed his residential address to Mumbai, which was taken as a signal that he plans on running for president once again. Chavan doesn’t have that kind of understanding of the workings of the MCA but if the high command believes there is political wisdom in contesting, the chief minister can be expected to pull out all stops. For, long called a technocrat politician without a mass base, Chavan has more or less silenced the periodic whispers that he will be repatriated to Delhi before the 2014 elections. There is more evidence everyday that BITS Pilani and Berkeley-educated Chavan is now ready to do the down and dirty of electoral politics. He would have factored in one thing – in the MCA elections, almost 60 percent of the votes are from government institutions (colleges and the kind also included) and only 40 percent from clubs. The CM may have the backing of the former. That a politician of the stature of Gopinath Munde, former deputy chief minister of Maharashtra, has been reduced to a bit player in the MCA elections where the possible big faceoff is being tagged as the one between Chavan and Pawar is also no coincidence. That in fact follows the trajectory of Maharashtra politics for a while now – all through 2012, in fact, as results poured in from local body elections across the state, the big verdict was in fact that the main contest in Maharashtra is no longer the Congress-NCP versus the Shiv Sena-BJP. The main opposition parties in the Maharashtra Assembly have indeed been reduced to also-rans in the much more colourful battle between the Congress and the NCP – and they are all present here as well. Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray and his son Aditya Thackeray are MCA voters from the Merry Cricket club and Young friends Union club respectively. MNS Supremo Raj Thackeray’s close friend and MNS MLA Nitin Sardesai has joined the fray too, NCP state President Jitendra Awad (Muslim sports club), Uddhav Thackeray’s PA Milind Narvekar (New Hindu club), Shiv Sena leader Subhash desai (Prabodhan club Goregaon), Shiv Sena’s Rahul Shevale (Dadar cricket club) and Congress leader and Industries Minister Narayan Rane (Eleven sports club) will all be there to watch the tamasha. Pawar and Chavan, allies in the state as well as at the Center, have had a good amount of barb-throwing at each other. The noise over the union minister’s latest comment that chief minister appears to have policy paralysis and is too slow signing files was hardly a novel theme – the comments going back and forth were in fact par for the course through 2012. Chavan has complained at regular intervals about the compulsions of coalition politics – in fact that has been his stock answer at every comparison of Mumbai with Sheila Dikshit’s Delhi. In a majority of local body polls through 2011-12, the alliance partners fought against one another, forming pre-poll and post-poll alliances only where convenient. Overall, the NCP’s superlative growth, repairing dents in its Western Maharashtra strongholds and covering new ground elsewhere and especially in urban areas and in Congress bastion Vidarbha, has been cause for concern for the Congress in Maharashtra. The chief minister’s own hometown of Karad in Satara found its local body poll swept by a local front backed by an Independent legislator who supports the NCP. There is talk that this is mostly political posturing – the Congress merely wanting to show Pawar that it can play his game. Whoever wins this one, the build-up is promising to overshadow the result.