THE on-off relationship between the Shiv Sena and its Rajya Sabha member Sanjay Nirupam came to what many people saw as a logical conclusion on March 10. This came about not because of a conflict between Nirupam's Bihari origins and the Sena's hostility to North Indians in Mumbai, but because of the former's determination to bring up a delicate issue in the Rajya Sabha. He wanted the House to discuss a huge allocation of Reliance Infocomm shares to a businessman who was a close associate of Bharatiya Janata Party leader Pramod Mahajan.
Briefly, this was the sequence of events - Mahajan reportedly told Bal Thackeray that unless Nirupam was silenced the alliance was over in Maharashtra. Thackeray tried to restrain Nirupam, who refused to fall in line. The Sena boss then asked for his resignation, though senior Sena men say he was expelled.
Infocomm had given one crore of its shares, at a highly discounted rate of Re.1 each, to three companies controlled by Ashish Deora, a Mumbai businessman. Infocomm recently took back the shares from him. There was, on the surface, nothing wrong with the deal and it appeared to follow a contract between the two parties. Finance Minister P. Chidambaram has clarified that Infocomm is not a public limited company and so not governed by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). It was Deora's political connections that raised a storm. Deora is a college friend of Mahajan's son Rahul, also a businessman, and a business partner of Mahajan's son-in-law.
Deora and Infocomm have said that Mahajan had nothing to do with the deal. But there are allegations that the deal goes back to the days when Mahajan was Telecommunications Minister in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government. That raises a string of unanswered questions. Nirupam says he was unfairly targeted when he tried to find the answers.
Nirupam claims he had no intention of dragging Mahajan into a controversy. All he wanted to do was raise the issue since it was "well within his rights to do so". In a familiar turn of events, he blamed the media: "The media created the impression that I was going to name Pramod Mahajan in Parliament. That is what made him approach Balasaheb, after which I was told to stay off the topic."
For the Sena, the choice was clear. It could better afford to lose Nirupam than the alliance with the BJP. The two parties may be on a par in Maharashtra but the BJP has an edge because of its greater national presence. So the Sena could not afford to ignore Mahajan's request.
But then, would the BJP have carried out Mahajan's threat? True, he was the architect of the saffron alliance and to that extent still has Thackeray's ear. But he has been under siege in his party for a while, with other second-rung leaders such as Uma Bharati and Sushma Swaraj gunning for him. In the State, his standing is at an all-time low after the Sena-BJP's defeat in the October Assembly elections. Party office-bearers have accused him of arrogance and of introducing "five star culture" into the party. Mahajan's threat, it seems, actually gave the Sena an excuse to get rid of Nirupam. The gesture helps to paper over the cracks that develop from time to time between the Sena and the BJP. It also gives Thackeray a future bargaining tool with Mahajan. And most importantly, it resolves the edgy issue of Nirupam's influence within the Sena. His resignation was sudden but not unexpected, for Nirupam never really fit into the Sena's ethos.
One of the most frequent questions that Nirupam had to answer over the years was how he could be part of a party with a virulent stand against North Indians settled in Mumbai. Invariably sycophantic, his answers never rang true. But despite his frequent and loud declarations of allegiance to Bal Thackeray, Nirupam was never part of the inner circle. Nor was he trusted by older Sainiks.
Nirupam's claim of leaving the party because it thwarted his fight against corruption is not easy to believe. He does not have a reputation as a political crusader. Raising a controversial issue, and one that would put the spotlight on a party ally, was uncharacteristic of him.
The closest he came to disagreeing with Thackeray before was in 2003, at the peak of the Sena's hostility towards North Indians in Mumbai. Visiting North Indian candidates for a Railways recruitment examination were attacked by Shiv Sainiks as their train pulled into the city. They would, the Sena said, take away jobs from Maharashtrians (Cover Story, Frontline, December 19, 2003). Nirupam walked a fine line, pacifying the North Indian voters in the city without belittling the Sena's line of thought. Nirupam said he had differences with the Sena leadership on prominent issues such as the `Mee Mumbaikar' campaign and the slum demolition drive in Mumbai, both with undercurrents of anti-North Indian sentiments. But there was never any clear sign of conflict between him and the party.
He was bolder after his resignation. "Nobody can stop people from coming to Mumbai. If the Sena wants to do this it will have to get the Constitution amended to seek a Jammu and Kashmir-like special status for Mumbai but they must consider what that would do to Mumbaikars," he said.
