Eknath Khadse
| Photo Credit: The Hindu
After spending over 40 years in the BJP, veteran leader Eknath Khadse’s profile on X only mentions that he is a Member of the Legislative Council and former Minister of Maharashtra. It has been over two weeks since Mr. Khadse, currently with the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar), announced that he is going back to his “home, to the BJP that he gave his all”.
“Officially I am with the NCP (SP) because the BJP has not officially asked me to move back. I am stuck in between and that’s why I couldn’t accompany Raksha [Khadse, his daughter-in-law, who is the BJP candidate from the Raver Lok Sabha seat] to file her nomination. I feel if I could enter the BJP officially, then I could have openly campaigned for the party and that would have helped Raksha’s campaign enormously,” he said.
There have not been any meetings with Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who was at Jalgaon to campaign for Ms. Raksha. Mr. Khadse, who had blamed differences with Mr. Fadnavis for his exit from the BJP, refuses to read much into the situation. “There is no question of invitation when we are in different parties. Why would Mr. Fadnavis meet me anyway?”
‘Got green signal’
Mr. Khadse does not feel his announcement to return to the BJP was “premature” at all. “I was called by senior party workers such as Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president J.P. Nadda, and BJP general secretary Vinod Tawde. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi had proposed that I should return to the party. When all the senior Ministers gave the green signal, only then did I make a public announcement. It has been three years since I left the party, so when I was called to join again, it felt like my own family had called me to come back home.”
He accepts that there is a faction in the BJP that is trying to stop his re-entry.“For years, we [he and Mr. Fadnavis] said harsh words against each other inside and outside the Assembly. So, it is natural for them to feel that if I come back, then their power or stature in the party will somehow diminish. I totally understand this mindset, but I have personally tried to fix it by speaking to senior leaders and party workers, but some people do not want to move ahead in life and want to hold lifelong grudges,” he said.
On not being able to bring industries and address job scarcity in the region, Mr. Khadse admitted that his government could not do much about it, but faulty Central government policies too were to blame. “We must accept that we have not done much in terms of bringing industries here, but we have done extensive work in irrigation projects. The industrial belt in Maharashtra is restricted to a triangle around Mumbai, such as the Konkan and Nashik regions. We tried to break that triangle but failed.”
‘Politics has lost its class’
Calling out hate speeches, and religion- and caste-based politics, Mr. Khadse said such a discriminatory tone was only seen in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh during his tenure. “We too used to pass satirical remarks against the Opposition, but later, we all would meet up and laugh about it. There was friendship, people did not cross the line to demean each other, and even if a few did, they would feel ashamed. Politics has lost its class and standards.”