The nomination of three-term Congress MLA and former Minister Vijay Wadettiwar as the new Leader of the Opposition (LoP) in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly signals the growing weight of the Vidarbha region within the Congress as well as in State politics.
An influential OBC (Other Backward Class) leader from Chandrapur district, Mr. Wadettiwar is known as a politically aggressive face of the party who has successfully resisted the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) onslaught in Vidarbha.
His selection by the party high command, after nearly a month of the LoP post remaining vacant, comes when the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition has been jolted by the desertion of NCP leader and erstwhile LoP Ajit Pawar, who joined the ruling BJP-Eknath Shinde government last month.
Mr. Ajit Pawar was long perceived as going ‘soft’ on Devendra Fadnavis and Eknath Shinde in his capacity as LoP. Mr. Wadettiwar’s pugnacious style of functioning is expected to remedy this.
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This is the second time that Mr. Wadettiwar has been given the LoP’s post under similar circumstances. In March 2019, senior Congressman Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil, who later joined the BJP, had sparked a crisis by resigning as LoP in the Assembly.
In the months before the 2019 Lok Sabha and Assembly elections, Mr. Wadettiwar, with his customary dynamism, effectively countered the BJP with the result being that the Congress gave its best performance in the Vidarbha region in both elections.
However, his appointment as the new LoP in the Assembly has stirred discord within party ranks, with Congress members from western Maharashtra, particularly the Maratha community, unhappy with the choice.
They are upset that both plum party posts — that of the Maharashtra Congress president (currently held by Nana Patole) and the LoP — have been given to leaders from the same OBC community, hailing from the same region.
That Mr. Patole and Mr. Wadettiwar are Congress ‘imports’ from the BJP and Shiv Sena, respectively, has not endeared them to the loyalists of western Maharashtra.
Congressmen from this region claim the high command’s passing over of senior Maratha leaders like Prithviraj Chavan (MLA from Karad in Satara) and Sangram Thopate (MLA from Bhor in Pune) is a move to appease their ally, NCP chief Sharad Pawar, who is not enamoured of either leader.
Analysts see Mr. Wadettiwar’s appointment as a move to counter the BJP, which has been trying to woo back the OBC vote bank in the State while consolidating the Congress in Vidarbha, where the party currently has the maximum number of MLAs (15 of its total strength of 45) in the State.
According to senior political analyst Vivek Bhavsar, in the years between 2014 and 2019, the BJP has lost a chunk of OBC voters in Maharashtra.
“The party has seen a shift of 5-7% of the OBC vote bank. The incoming leaders into the BJP since 2014 have principally been from the Maratha community, be it Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil (Ahmednagar), Sanjaykaka Patil (Sangli) or Harshawardhan Patil (Pune), tall leaders from the Maratha community moved over to the BJP,” Mr. Bhavsar said.
Devendra Fadnavis’ tenure as CM (2014-19) alienated a number of OBC leaders within the BJP, with leaders like Pankaja Munde, Eknath Khadse (now with the NCP), and Prakash Mehta, among others, blaming Mr. Fadnavis for engineering their defeats in the 2019 Assembly election and denying them tickets.
Since then, the BJP has made efforts at damage control, appointing Chandrashekhar Bawankule, a notable OBC leader from Vidarbha, as State president in August 2022.
“Today, no less than 67 of the 70-odd zilla presidents of the BJP are from OBC communities. To counter this, the Congress needed a leader with grassroots connect as LoP. By this, Mr. Wadettiwar seems an apt choice,” Mr. Bhavsar said.
But Congressmen from western Maharashtra feel that Mr. Wadettiwar’s appointment goes against the party’s tradition of ensuring regional and caste balance.
“Historically, the Congress has always balanced region and caste while nominating Chief Minister and Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) presidents. If a Congress CM was from Vidarbha, then the PCC chief would be from Marathwada or western Maharashtra and vice-versa,” senior Congress leader and former lawmaker Anant Gadgil said.
The Vidarbha region is undoubtedly critical, with ten of the 48 Lok Sabha seats and 62 of the 288 Assembly seats in the State concentrated here.
While a third of the party’s elected representatives (15) hail from Vidarbha, the Congress also has 12 legislators from the ‘sugar belt’ districts of Pune, Kolhapur, Satara, Sangli and Solapur.
Once a Congress heartland, the party has steadily lost ground, first to Sharad Pawar’s NCP and now to the BJP, in western Maharashtra.
“By not appointing a Maratha leader from this region as LoP, the Congress is virtually ceding this belt to Mr. Pawar for fear of offending him. We needed some representation in order to reclaim lost ground,” a senior Congress leader said, requesting anonymity.
