For someone whose dawn in politics began with the blessings of late Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray, it will be a homecoming of sorts for expelled Congress leader Sanjay Nirupam, who is widely expected to join Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde’s ruling Shiv Sena faction.
Hailing from Rohtas in the eastern Indian State of Bihar, journalism was Mr. Nirupam’s metier; he began his career as a journalist in 1986, and moved to Mumbai in 1988 where he worked with the Jansatta, the sister publication of the Indian Express.
An ardent film buff and admirer of iconic Bollywood star Dev Anand, Mr. Nirupam even penned the story for Dev Anand’s Return of Jewel Thief (1996) – the failed sequel to classic Jewel Thief (1967).
It was here that he became friends with his namesake – Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) spokesperson Sanjay Raut, who was then cutting his teeth at Loksatta (the Marathi publication arm of the Indian Express).
After Mr. Raut moved on to Saamana (the Shiv Sena’s mouthpiece), he put a call to his friend Mr. Nirupam, intimating him of the party’s need for a journalist to head its Hindi mouthpiece - Dopahar ka Saamana. The Hindi edition was Bal Thackeray’s brainchild begun with the aim of reaching out to Mumbai’s Hindi-speaking populace in the aftermath of the 1992 Bombay riots. In a twist of fate, as their respective political careers progressed, Mr. Raut would later become Mr. Nirupam’s bitter political foe, and one of the myriad reasons for his exit from the Congress.
Mr. Nirupam joined Dopahar ka Saamana as its executive editor in 1993, and his career subsequently saw a meteoric rise, with the maverick Shiv Sena supremo sending the scribe as a Shiv Sena MP to the Rajya Sabha in 1996.
Importantly, Mr. Nirupam became the firebrand face of the Shiv Sena’s endeavor to reach out to Mumbai’s thriving North Indian voters, after the party shifted from its nativist stance of the late 1960s to adopting a hardline ‘Hindutva’ position in the 1980s.
Mr. Nirupam’s Sena sojourn came to a crashing end after he was asked to step down as Rajya Sabha MP in 2005, a full-year ahead of the expiry of term.
It was said that Mr. Nirupam was planning to raise the issue of the huge allocation of Reliance Infocomm shares to a businessman said to be a close associate of late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan – which would have been a source of contretemps for the BJP and the Shiv Sena, firm ideological allies then closely locked in a saffron embrace.
Mr. Nirupam quit the Sena and joined the Congress in April 2005, being soon appointed as general secretary of the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee. He won the Mumbai North Lok Sabha seat in the 2009 general election, defeating the BJP’s Ram Naik by a little more than 6,000 votes in a keenly-fought contest.
The Congressman’s political fortunes, however, saw a sharp slide with the BJP’s re-emergence at the Centre under PM Modi in 2014.
This period was marked a general decline in the party’s fortunes in Maharashtra and Mumbai, with Mr. Nirupam resigning as the Mumbai Congress president following the party’s rout in the 2017 Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) civic poll.
The frenetic political maneuvering between parties after the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly election resulted in the formation of the tripartite Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government headed by Uddhav Thackeray – an unlikely (and uneasy) coalition of the ideologically opposed Congress and Sharad Pawar’s (undivided) Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) on one hand, and Mr. Thackeray’s undivided Sena on the other.
A firm opponent of an alliance with the Sena, this period marked Mr. Nirupam’s emergence as a ‘Cassandra’ within the Congress, warning of the dangers in letting Uddhav Thackeray’s party dominate over the Congress in Mumbai.
In July 2020, much to the embarrassment of the MVA, Mr. Nirupam sought an investigation into the Thackeray family’s newly-constructed residential property in Mumbai’s Bandra.
The resentment against the Sena (UBT) persisted during the thorny seat-sharing talks among the MVA partners, with the tiff between the Sena (UBT) and the Congress reaching a crescendo after Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Raut remained firm on his party contesting 23 (of a total 48) Lok Sabha seats in the State, while claiming four seats in Mumbai city and two in Thane.
This drew sharp criticism from Mr. Nirupam and Milind Deora (now in Mr. Shinde’s Sena) who said the Sena (UBT)’s demands were excessive given that their vote-base had fragmented following the split in their ranks.
Mr. Nirupam vehemently protested to the Congress leadership for yielding to the Sena (UBT)’s demands, while dubbing Mr. Thackeray’s faction as “a call centre to which the Congress had outsourced its activities” in an interview given to a vernacular channel.
Mr. Nirupam, casting aspersions on the Sena (UBT)’s capability to win seats in the upcoming elections, had said no one knew what was the Thackeray-led factions’ core vote-bank was in the current scenario.
Through it all, the former Congressman has not lost his journalistic acerbity, remarking drolly on his ex-party after his expulsion on April 3: “Looks like immediately after the party [Congress] received my resignation letter last night, they decided to issue my expulsion. Good to see such promptness.”
