Deputy chief minister Chhagan Bhujbal has created a flutter by publicly admonishing his own party — the Nationalist Congress Party — for giving undue importance to the caste of candidates. The NCP, incidentally, is widely perceived as a Maratha-strong party after its founder Sharad Pawar.
Speaking at a function held in Nashik this weekend, attended by party regional head Madhukar Pichad, home minister R.R. Patil and others, Mr Bhujbal said “We in NCP think about the caste of the candidate while giving him candidature and still call ourselves as a secular party.”
The meeting was held to scrutinise the performance of the party in the Nashik district during the recent Assembly elections. What will hurt the NCP most, however, would be the comparison that Mr Bhujbal drew with his former party Shiv Sena.
“Even the Shiv Sena doesn’t think in terms of caste and creed. I am aware of this because I have experienced the fact that the Sena does not have a caste bias when we were deciding candidature for elections at Aurangabad,” said Mr Bhujbal, adding that the NCP needed to shed its obsession with caste if it wanted to be labelled “secular”.
Mr Bhujbal lashing out against caste-based politics of the NCP came a few days after he had vociferously supported the need for a caste-based census so that the real number of other backward castes (OBC) could be known.
Mr Bhujbal over the past several years has been trying to build himself as a leader of the other backward castes groups in the state and his recent comments are seen in the same light by political observers.