With caste and political arithmetic in mind, how Fadnavis has been building up MLC Ram Shinde

Mumbai: In his congratulatory address to Ram Shinde, an MLC who was unanimously elected chairman of the Maharashtra Legislative Council Thursday, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis quipped that Shinde had been a teacher and knew how to run a class.

“I am certain if we all behave badly, you will discipline us,” Fadnavis said in the Upper Jouse, causing many to laugh.

Ram Shinde, who has grown in politics from the post of sarpanch to become a legislator, has been known to be close to Fadnavis. The post of the legislative council chairman had been vacant since July 2022, when the term of Ramraje Naik Nimbalkar ended.

With Ram Shinde’s unopposed election to the post, the BJP now controls both houses of the Maharashtra legislature. BJP leader Rahul Narwekar was re-elected as the state assembly Speaker last week in a special session of the legislature in Mumbai.

The fact that Ram Shinde is a Dhangar helps the BJP in caste arithmetic, considering the community has not been represented in the cabinet. The state government has also been unable to meet the Dhangar community’s demand of getting reservation under the Scheduled Tribes (ST) quota.

But the benefits of elevating Ram Shinde help Fadnavis’s political arithmetic, too.

Political commentator Hemant Desai said: “After Fadnavis became CM, he built up some leaders as his own men. One of them was Ram Shinde, a Dhangar leader. Gopinath Munde had created a strong Dhangar and Vanjari (an OBC caste) following for himself. Building up Ram Shinde helps Fadnavis get some of that following in his corner.”

Moreover, the political growth of Ram Shinde helps check some of the clout of Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, also a satrap from the Ahmednagar district, Desai said.

Vikhe Patil, who joined the BJP in 2019, has been steadily growing to be a power centre within the party, having met the party’s central leadership on multiple occasions in the last five years.

Ram Shinde has often had friction with other leaders of the BJP and the ruling Mahayuti alliance, and he has not held back from voicing his disappointment openly.

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Who is Ram Shinde?

Shinde, 55, who is from Maharashtra’s Ahmednagar district—which the state government renamed Ahilyanagar earlier this year—is a ninth-generation descendant of the family of warrior queen Ahilyabai Holkar.

The leader, a teacher who has studied the science of medicinal plants, grew up in an economically difficult situation despite being a descendant of Ahilyabai Holkar’s father, Mankoji Shinde. Ram Shinde’s father was an agricultural labourer.

He started his political career as the sarpanch of Chondi village, the birthplace of Ahilyadevi Holkar, in the Jamshed taluka of Ahmednagar district in 2000.

He first became an MLA from the Karjat Jamkhed assembly constituency in 2009 and was re-elected in 2014. When Fadnavis became Maharashtra CM in 2014, he inducted Shinde into his cabinet as a minister of state in charge of portfolios such as home (rural) and public health.

Speaking in the legislative council Thursday, Deputy CM Ajit Pawar said that between 2009 and 2014, MLAs used to remember Shinde as a quiet first-time legislators who would demurely sit on the opposition benches while seniors like Fadnavis led the Opposition’s march against the then Congress-Nationalist Congress Party government.

“But, after 2014 when he became a part of the cabinet, there was a certain modish factor about him. He would come dressed in safari suits and there was an overall change in his demeanour,” Pawar said.

In 2016, when Fadnavis reorganised his cabinet, he elevated Shinde to cabinet rank, allocating the water conservation and protocol departments to him. The allocation of the water conservation department to Shinde especially became controversial as it was taken away from the incumbent BJP leader, Pankaja Munde, and reallocated to Shinde.

Fadnavis’ pet Jalyukta Shivar project, aimed at mitigating drought-like conditions by increasing the soil moisture content, was being implemented under the water conservation department.

Fadnavis’ decision to clip Munde’s wings and take the portfolio away from her had caused much heartburn. Munde had taken to the social media platform X, saying she would not attend a global water conservation conference she was scheduled to in Singapore. Fadnavis also took to X, urging her to go as a representative of the government.

Meanwhile, Shinde initially dithered on taking charge of the department saying he wanted to do so after meeting Munde, daughter late BJP stalwart Gopinath Munde, the party’s most prominent OBC leader.

Party sources also said Shinde’s Karjat Jamkhed constituency has a significant population of Vanjaris, the OBC caste the Mundes belong to, and he didn’t want to risk upsetting them.

“Ram Shinde was a follower of Gopinath Munde. By elevating Ram Shinde to cut Pankaja Munde to size, Fadnavis was attempting to break the Munde power centre within the BJP. And by elevating Ram Shinde to cabinet rank, Fadnavis also ensured that the Munde support group was not completely antagonised,” political commentator Abhay Deshpande told ThePrint.

Shinde lost both the 2019 and 2024 Maharashtra assembly polls to Rohit Pawar, grandnephew of NCP founder Sharad Pawar.

After he lost the 2019 election, he was hoping to be accommodated as an MLC in 2020, but did not make the cut. He was elected to the Upper House in 2022.

Friction with Vikhe Patils

Ram Shinde has been an ambitious leader and that has often led to friction with other leaders. In 2019, when he lost the Karjat Jamkhed poll to Rohit Pawar, he had squarely blamed Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, another strong power centre from the Ahmednagar district, for his defeat.

Vikhe Patil’s son Sujay had joined the BJP ahead of the Lok Sabha polls in 2019 and successfully fought the election from Ahmednagar on a BJP ticket. Vikhe Patil himself joined the BJP in the run up to the Maharashtra assembly polls that year.

In 2023, Shinde had alleged that the Vikhe Patils worked against the party’s interests in the Agriculture Produce Market Committee election.

Shinde and the Vikhe Patils had clashed during the Lok Sabha election this year too, which Sujay, the BJP’s candidate, lost to Nilesh Lanke from the Sharad Pawar-led NCP.

In the assembly election this year, the Vikhe Patils scripted a comeback by orchestrating the victory of 10 of 12 Mahayuti candidates in the Ahmednagar district, also ensuring the defeat of heavyweights such as the Congress’s Balasaheb Thorat.

Shinde lost the Karjat Jamkhed poll to Rohit Pawar by a slim margin of 1,243 votes.

After the election, when Mahayuti ally Ajit Pawar had bumped into Rohit, he congratulated his nephew and jokingly remarked that had he addressed a rally in the constituency, Rohit could have lost.

Shinde had given a tart reaction to their conversation, saying that Mahayuti allies did not follow the alliance dharma.

On Thursday, Ajit Pawar while congratulating Shinde in the Upper House said: “I was not sure whether to talk about this. You were a little upset that I didn’t address a rally in your constituency during this election and you had also said that you lost because of that. But in a way it worked out well. You stayed an MLC and this is the most prestigious post in the legislature.”

(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)

Also Read: With 2 deputies & Mahayuti riding on supermajority, Fadnavis 3.0 will be different