What made the entire episode even more bizarre was that the three of them—Kshitij, Hitendra and Tawde—then left the hotel in the same car, making jokes about going out to eat together and sharing the pot.
Hitendra Thakur later told reporters he took Tawde along on the suggestions of the police to safely get him out of the hotel, away from the angry crowd of workers from across parties.
The Thakurs said they had got the tip-off about Tawde from members of the BJP itself.
All stakeholders—the Thakurs, members of the Opposition, even some members of the BJP and political commentators—were slightly baffled about why a seasoned politician like Tawde with four decades of experience would go to Nalasopara less than 24 hours before elections, with or without cash.
What seemed to stun people less was the suggestion that the tip-off came from someone within the BJP.
Tawde has seen his fair share of intra-party politics, especially in the last 10 years.
Experts said the incident revealed the divide within the party.
“The whole episode once again shows that the competitiveness within Maharashtra’s politics is not just between the two main alliances. It is between individual leaders and within parties as well. It must have been a strategic decision for Vinod Tawde to go there. With whose advice did Tawde go there? How did people find out? The kind of spectacle that played out seemed pre-planned,” said Dr. Sanjay Patil, a researcher at Mumbai University’s politics and civics department.
“Given the kind of politics that has been going on within the BJP, when something like this happens, it exposes the fissures within the party,” he added.
Tawde and intra-party politics
Tawde told reporters on Tuesday night that he was passing through the neighbourhood of Nalasopara when he called the BJP’s candidate, Rajan Naik, to ask how things were going.
“He told me he and his karyakartas (workers) were all sitting together, and why don’t I join them for tea? So I went there for tea. There were about 200-250 booth pramukhs. Hitendra Thakur and his son alleged that I had come there to distribute money. Their party workers came, they started shouting, there was a lot of chaos. I told the police, I told the Election Commission, you look at the CCTV footage (of the hotel), check whatever you must. There is nothing wrong in going to have tea with the karyakarta who works day and night for the party,” the former state minister said.
“I have been in politics for 40 years. There’s never been any issue of money (distribution) ever in my life. The whole world knows that,” he added.
Earlier in the day, he had told reporters that he had gone to Nalasopara to brief party workers on the procedure to be followed on the day of the elections.
While Tawde has been away from state politics, his name has been doing the rounds within Maharashtra’s political circles as the BJP’s possible pick as chief minister if it gets a majority.
Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis has evidently been the face of the BJP’s campaign in Maharashtra.
However, speculation has arisen about Tawde being considered for the top post because of his Maratha credentials as against Fadnavis’ Brahmin tag, as well as Tawde’s equation with the party’s leadership.
The two leaders have also had some friction in the past.
Tawde was a cabinet minister in the Fadnavis-led cabinet, in charge of school, higher and technical education and medical education, as well as cultural affairs.
The leader battled allegations of violating norms while awarding a Rs 191-crore contract for fire extinguishers in schools. In 2016, Tawde was also targeted by the Opposition for being allegedly associated with a for-profit company despite being a minister.
While Fadnavis defended Tawde through the allegations, he clipped Tawde’s influence in 2016 by reallocating the medical education portfolio to Girish Mahajan, a leader said to be close to the former chief minister.
From then on, Tawde gradually started fading into the background in the state’s political affairs, with the final nail being the party’s decision to drop him for the 2019 assembly polls.
Party sources say Tawde met Union Home Minister Amit Shah in 2020 to express his disappointment with the party’s decision to drop him as an MLA candidate.
While Shah did not spell it out to Tawde, the list had Fadnavis’ imprints, and the Union home minister simply advised Tawde to be patient, party sources said.
A senior BJP leader, who did not wish to be identified, said, “Vinod Tawde had, in one of his media interviews, spoken about the CM candidate in Maharashtra, and given the examples of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in the same breath. He spoke about promoting local leaders. I don’t want to name anyone, but senior aspirants within the party may not have liked it.”
“It is difficult to believe why a person of Tawde’s stature in the party would have gone to Nalasopara a day before elections with or without cash, even if just to address karyakarta. It could have been Tawde’s way of making his presence felt in Maharashtra and the state leaders here may not have liked it,” he said.
After the BJP’s dismal performance in this year’s Lok Sabha polls in Maharashtra, Fadnavis had to step up and take responsibility. If the assembly poll throws up a similar fate for the party, from the point of view of the state leadership, some of that blame can be deflected to Tawde after Tuesday’s episode, the leader added.
Fadnavis defended Tawde, calling the entire episode the MVA’s ploy.
“Vinod ji Tawde is our national general secretary. He had just gone to meet karyakartas there. No money or objectionable items have been recovered from him. On the contrary, he was attacked. Our Nalasopara candidate, Rajan Naik, was attacked. Overall, this ecosystem of the MVA has tried to throw cover fire to cover their impending loss. Vinod Tawde is blameless in all of this,” he said.
Things, however, do not add up, political commentator Hemant Desai said.
“Devendra Fadnavis is the state home minister. Yet the BVA gets information at such a sensitive time and the police machinery immediately acts on it. It raises a lot of questions. This will have some impact on the BJP’s credibility going into elections,” he said.
Tawde’s rise in national politics
Born in Mumbai’s Marathi heartland of Girangaon, Tawde was groomed by late BJP stalwarts Pramod Mahajan and Gopinath Munde.
He had been associated with the RSS-linked Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) since his college days.
Throughout his four-decade-long political career, Tawde has worked in various positions for the ABVP and the BJP, making cadre-building and organisation his forte.
Within the ABVP, Tawde rose from karyakarta to organising secretary of the Mumbai Central Zone, and eventually the All India General Secretary of the outfit.
In 1995, Tawde took charge as general secretary of the Maharashtra BJP, and in 1999, became the president of the Mumbai BJP. He was Leader of Opposition in Maharashtra’s legislative council from 2011 to 2014, and then became an MLA from Mumbai’s Borivali constituency.
With Fadnavis’ rise within the party to being its face in Maharashtra by 2019, there were whispers of the old guard such as Tawde, Pankaja Munde and Eknath Khadse being disillusioned. Khadse eventually quit the party, blaming Fadnavis, in 2020.
The same year, Tawde and Pankaja Munde, were rehabilitated within the party by being made the BJP’s national secretaries.
A year later, in 2021, Tawde was elevated to the post of general secretary to fill a vacancy after Bhupendra Yadav became Union minister.
Speaking to reporters in Nagpur, Fadnavis had then said Tawde’s appointment is “a matter of pride for Maharashtra”.
“After Pramod ji (former Union minister Mahajan) and Gopinath ji (former Union minister Munde), this is the first time that Maharashtra has got the honour of the general secretary’s post. It is happy news,” Fadnavis said.
In his national role, Tawde was the election in charge for five states that went to the polls in 2022 – Goa, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Manipur. The BJP won all, but Punjab.
Tawde is currently in charge of Bihar, which goes to the polls next year.
At the time of his elevation as national general secretary, Tawde had given a measured response, attributing his promotion to “patience”.
“It is not in the nature of a karyakarta like me to lose patience immediately after being denied a ticket and say ‘I am leaving the party’. Do the work that is given to you and if you do that work, then it will be noted. This has become even clearer to the karyakartas by this elevation of mine,” he had said.
After Tuesday’s potboiler, and the Thakurs’ insinuations of it being an intra-party conspiracy, Tawde may need to wear that one virtue again—patience.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
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