Former Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan had undertaken an image-building exercise with a calculation that it could influence the Congress high command and thus help him to prolong his stay in power.
If the Congress insiders are to be believed, he undertook this exercise on the basis of reports in a section of the media.
Mr Chavan, who is believed to have projected himself as a nominee of the AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi, had even called select journalists at a five-star hotel in New Delhi for an “interaction” as a part of the image-building exercise. But that did not help him.
In fact, the Adarsh scam in Mumbai surfaced only after that.
Mr Chavan, son of the late S.B. Chavan, was perhaps the second lightweight chief minister Maharashtra had after the late Babasaheb Bhosale. The Sharad Pawar-led NCP had backed him because it wanted a lightweight chief minister for obvious reasons. The junior Chavan had failed to create his own political constituency across the state despite being in power for over 15 years.
Analysing why Mr Chavan could not create his own image in the state despite being a minister in various Congress governments, a senior party leader viewed that this could be because his leadership never emerged out of struggles. His father had fought with the late leaders Y.B. Chavan and Vasantdada Patil on certain issues and was not for having good relations with Mr Sharad Pawar despite the fact that he was in the first non-Congress government headed by Mr Pawar. He was virtually the undisputed leader of Marathwada region and had tried to remove the developmental backlog of the region and brought several schemes there.
But Mr Chavan grew under protection and remained a district-level leader.
However, his well-wishers in New Delhi want to rehabilitate him either in the organisation or make him a Rajya Sabha member in place of chief minister Prithviraj Chavan.