60 highlights
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It was a strange situation: the opposition was protesting the surveillance of a ruling minister, while members of the ruling party seemed too scared to speak up.
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The report of the bugging erupted against the background of persistent rumours that ministers were under surveillance by the prime minister’s office.
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A story circulated of how the environment minister, Prakash Javadekar, while on the way to the airport attired in jeans at the start of an official trip abroad, received a call telling him that he was dressed too casually.
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IN NAGPUR, THE RSS’S HOME, the accepted truth is that Gadkari is the organisation’s favourite son. This was affirmed in 2009, when he was made the youngest ever national president of the BJP to the great displeasure of the party’s senior leaders in Delhi, and again in 2012, when the party’s constitution was amended to allow him a second term—although that term never came to pass.
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He lacks the charisma or sophistication that could get him due attention from the Delhi media, and becomes a talking point only on the occasions he is touched by controversy—typically for airing outlandish ideas such as organising the collection of human urine for use as a substitute to fertiliser.
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“There is a tussle going on between the RSS and Modi—both want to pull down each other,” the political journalist Sujata Anandan, who has known Gadkari since his youth, told me. For now, with Modi’s popularity and power soaring, “the RSS has no choice,” but “there is the Modi faction and then there is the RSS faction within the government.”
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These were days of absolute Congress domination, and the BJP was a pushover, seen as an urban party of the bhatji and sethji—the Brahmin and the bania.
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The conventional political wisdom those days was that Maharashtrian voters were averse to Brahmin leaders—a hangover from the brutal reign of the Peshwas, Brahmin rulers of the Maratha Empire.
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To counter the view of the BJP as a Brahmin party, Pramod Mahajan, who ran the party’s state unit, promoted his brother-in-law, Gopinath Munde, a leader from the Other Backward Classes.
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THE BJP-SHIV SENA ALLIANCE, intent on burnishing its credentials, made it a flagship initiative to construct 55 flyovers in Mumbai, as well as a six-lane expressway linking Mumbai and Pune that was to cut the travel time between the two cities in half.
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Gadkari takes credit for introducing to India a model of public-private partnership known as build–operate–transfer: a concept he picked up on an official trip to Malaysia, which involves granting the entity building a project a concession to operate it so as to recover costs.
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Gadkari and his supporters have spoken untiringly of how he turned down a Rs 3,200-crore tender for the Mumbai-Pune expressway from Dhirubhai Ambani’s Reliance Industries. He entrusted the project instead to the newly created and state-owned Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation, which, backed by a loan guarantee from the government, raised the necessary funds on the market and completed the projects at a far lower cost.
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A long-time journalist from Maharashtra told me that politics played a part in this. Mahajan was close to the Ambanis and favoured granting the contract to Reliance.
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“Soon after the expressway was opened, there was a lot of dacoity, especially at night-time,” Anandan told me. “The highway patrol realised that it’s the villagers, who are resentful. They would either loot or even kill.
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Gadkari earned a lasting reputation in the city for this work; many in Nagpur told me a story of how Bal Thackeray used to call him roadkari and pulkari—a man who builds roads and bridges.
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“Gadkari used to fight with rival parties in the open but would shake hands in private,” a veteran Nagpur journalist told me.
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Emulating Pawar, Gadkari looked to bolster his power by nurturing connections and influence in cooperative banks and societies on his home turf. For instance, his wife Kanchan and Anil Sole, his long-time associate, are both currently chairpersons of large cooperative banks.
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Pawar’s associates controlled cooperative banks that provided vital credit to the area’s businessmen, mainly sugar manufacturers, many of whom were also local political leaders.
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Advani disliked Mahajan—a favourite of Vajpayee’s—and backed Gadkari in place of Mahajan’s pick, Gopinath Munde. With a nudge from the RSS, the Nagpur man was elected to lead the party’s state unit.
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“Nitin Gadkari is a man who can make money without any money. He knew that he could do politics only if he had money. … Gadkari understood how to use cooperative banks to his benefit.”
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After Advani praised Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, as a secular man, the RSS fanned a scandal that ended with him resigning as the leader of the BJP.
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Sudhir Pathak, formerly the editor of the RSS mouthpiece Tarun Bharat, told me that it was Advani who first suggested Gadkari’s elevation, which the RSS happily accepted.
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Gadkari’s organisational style was on display at a BJP conclave in February 2010 in Indore, where all leaders and delegates were accommodated in tents. Pathak explained the significance of the change. “During the Jana Sangh days, the leaders used to stay at the party office or with cadres,” he said, but a “five-star-hotel culture had cut them off from people.”
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“Gadkari is inspired by Pawar’s model, but the important difference is that Pawar never gets openly associated with any of that,” Ganesh Kanate, a former journalist who is close to Gadkari, said. “You can’t link him to his businesses. He knows how to maintains distance, but Gadkari does not.”
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In March 2010, the company Global Safety Vision, owned by the businessman Dattatray Pandurang Mhaiskar and with paid-up capital of merely Rs 36,000, gave a low-interest loan of Rs 164 crore to a Purti Group subsidiary, Purti Sugar and Power Limited. Mhaiskar was the promoter of Ideal Road Builders, which had implemented numerous build-operate-transfer projects when Gadkari was the minister of public works.
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Sucheta Dalal, who had earlier applauded Gadkari for his achievements at the public-works ministry, published a scathing article on Gadkari’s collusion with rival parties.
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“After Sharad Pawar took control of the ministry under the Congress-NCP coalition, he quickly privatised the toll-collection and maintenance contract for MPE”—the Mumbai-Pune Expressway—“which was bagged by the unknown Mhaiskars of Ideal Road Builders (IRB). It was imperative for IRB to co-opt Mr Gadkari and ensure his silence, since the original project itself was drastically modified and the escalation in toll was structured to ensure massive profits.
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“The roots of the campaign against Nitin Gadkari have to be in Gujarat because when Ram Jethmalani demanded Gadkari’s resignation, he also demanded that Narendra Modi be made the prime ministerial candidate of the party,” Vaidya wrote.
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“The arrival of Modi on the scene … wrecked the RSS’s plans for Gadkari—to promote him as the leader of the opposition nationally and as a prime ministerial candidate eventually,” Anandan wrote in Maharashtra Maximus.
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“In 2009, when he became the BJP president, in a press conference we asked him how he could get there in such a short time,” the journalist said. “He asked the video journalists to step out and gave us two reasons: ‘One, never allow your competition to grow. Two, forget about people.‘”
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Praful maintained that OBC leaders were not allowed to settle in the BJP. “They got the OBC votes through a leader and sidelined the leader for next elections,” he said. “Then they brought in the second aspirant in his place.” Patil’s seat was taken by Devendra Fadnavis, a Brahmin. “They replaced the leaders but the votes stayed.”
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In 2008, a commission appointed to investigate the allotment of surplus land under the Urban Land Ceiling Act in Maharashtra between 1990 and 2006 reported that established rules had been ignored to hand numerous plots over to institutions tied to politicians from across party lines. The commission stated, “Maximum number of allotments have been recommended by Shri Nitin Gadkari, MLA/Minister numbering 16 approximately.”
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In 2010, the name of Ajay Sancheti, an entrepreneur with interests in infrastructure and links to the RSS, and since 2012 a member of the Rajya Sabha with the BJP, came up in connection to the manoeuvring behind the JMM-BJP government in Jharkhand.
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After the scandal broke in 2012, the Comptroller and Auditor General of Chhattisgarh, then ruled by the BJP, reported that SMS Infrastructure, owned by Sancheti, had entered into a mining deal that entailed losses of over Rs 1,000 crore for the state government.
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The Nagpur Municipal Corporation also brought private companies in to manage the city’s garbage collection, bus services and power distribution. In all three sectors, major allegations of corruption and mismanagement followed.
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In 2012, a firm named Orange City Water won a contract with the Nagpur Municipal Corporation, under BJP control, to take over the city’s water-supply system—this despite the failure of a pilot privatisation project, and protests by municipal workers.
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The body of a seven-year-old girl, Yogita Thakre, was found in a car at the politician’s home—known in Nagpur as Gadkariwada—while he was on a trip outside the city. The girl’s mother was then working as a domestic helper in the vicinity.
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The CID took a year to report that the death had been accidental. Unconvinced, the court ordered that the investigation continue. The CID filed another report in 2013, which the court rejected because of discrepancies.
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Prakash Deshpande, a personal assistant to Gadkari, was found dead on a railway platform while on his way to Nagpur from Mumbai. The speculation, according to the Indian Express, was that Deshpande was carrying “large amounts of party funds.”
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But, as the journalist Kumar Ketkar later wrote, “Modi could not have chosen Gadkari, who thought of himself as the ‘original development man’. Modi could not have created a parallel power centre. The chief minister of Maharashtra, by virtue of being in Mumbai, is automatically part of the corporate world. Gadkari is savvy with the wheeling-dealings of the stock market and the business community.
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“The cement prices were going up and he realised the big guys formed a cartel and were playing dirty. There were 117 small and medium cement units lying closed.” The ministry created a portal for its cement purchases. “The instructions were given regarding the quantity and quality of the cement,” and suppliers were informed that their products would be tested. “Many of the sick units got revived.
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Another hallmark of Gadkari’s style is his addiction to hyperbole—his tenure has been full of unrealistic targets and big announcements, especially when it comes to building roads.
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“Gadkari has created a small event to unveil the smallest of things to get mileage and talk that work is happening in the ministry,” the public-relations executive told me. The prime minister’s office “then can use the numbers to showcase that the economy is on the path to recovery.”
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“The first three projects—ambitious projects—and two foreign trips of Gadkari were not approved by Modi,” Kanate, the former journalist close to Gadkari, told me. “When the fourth file was rejected, Gadkari got very upset.” He called Mohan Bhagwat, and, as Kanate told it, said, “I can’t work like this, I would rather come back and remain a swayamsevak.” Bhagwat rushed to Delhi “the next day and called for a late-night meeting” with just Modi and Gadkari. The RSS chief “asked Modi if Gadkari creates hurdles for him or hurts the image of his government, to which Modi replied no. The final truce was made—Gadkari will never criticise Modi within or outside the party, Gadkari should be given freedom to do his work.” Ever since, “Gadkari’s ministry is not interfered with much. Today, Modi’s biggest projects are happening in Gadkari’s ministry.”1
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“When we asked him why he wasn’t there for such a big occasion, he said that he’d been asked to hold the press conference the next day,” a journalist covering the road ministry told me. “The reason given was that the prime minister wanted staggered publicity.” But this was “just an excuse. He looked very upset.”
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His promotion of ethanol-fuelled buses—he has also proposed raising the percentage of ethanol blended into automotive fuel—has raised questions of a conflict of interest. The Purti Group dramatically increased its ethanol production after he joined the cabinet.
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Documents leaked in early 2015 by a whistle-blower from the Essar Group, which revealed extensive efforts to curry favour in power circles, showed that in July 2013 Gadkari and his family had spent two nights on the French Riviera in an Essar-owned luxury yacht.
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In January 2016, IRB Infrastructure Developers—a firm of the Mhaiskar family, Gadkari’s old friends from his association with Ideal Road Builders—received a contract worth Rs 10,050 crore to build a tunnel at Zojila pass, connecting Kashmir and Ladakh. The deal was cancelled after the opposition raised allegations of corruption.
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Later in the year, The Hindu reported that the Indian Federation of Green Energy, a company run by Vaibhav Dange, Gadkari’s private secretary, had been raising funds and organising events for departments and units under the road ministry.
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“Where are those cases now?” an RSS leader known to be close to Gadkari told me. “How are they any different from the allegations against Amit Shah’s son?”
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He added that the income-tax official “who oversaw the raids against Gadkari has been amply rewarded.” (The official, KV Chowdary, was appointed the Central Vigilance Commissioner in June 2015, when he was only four months from retirement. He was the first officer from outside the Indian Administrative Service to hold the post.)
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Deodhar said, “The concept of privatisation is at the heart of Gadkari’s success. If he likes something, he will announce it without thinking much. Businessmen will surround him as they know that the government would not be able to do it.”
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Kanate added that Gadkari accepted charge of the ministry of water resources—and with it the government’s stalled Ganga clean-up—“only because Modi really insisted on it.”2
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The Delhi-based lobbyist told me a story he had heard from a minister. On 8 November 2016, as Modi prepared to announce his surprise decision to annul all high-denomination bank notes, he gathered his top ministers. After handing each a piece of blank paper, he asked for their opinions on whether he should withdraw all Rs 1,000 notes, all Rs 500 notes, or both. “Jaitley, being the finance minister, said, ‘We can demonetise 1,000-rupee notes but not 500-rupee notes. It will be a big jolt.’ To which Modi, not in jest but sarcasm, said, ‘Are you saying this because lawyers mostly store their money in 500s?’ Rajnath said, ‘Pehle hi kar dena chahiye tha, I am fully supportive of it.‘” Venkaiah Naidu, also a cabinet minister, supported the move as well. Then it was Gadkari’s turn. “He said, ‘This problem of black money should be finished once and for all. Demonetise everything from 1,000 to 100. Nobody keeps bundles of 50-rupee notes.’ Modi was taken aback.” When a colleague later asked Gadkari about this, “he said, ‘He had already made up his mind, he was just doing a paper exercise to corner us. So I tried to go one up on him.‘”
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The lobbyist for numerous large corporations said that Gadkari is “the only man who can openly crack jokes about the PM.” He relayed another famous story—such tales are so rare that they are widely savoured in Delhi’s power circles—about how the BJP leader Shahnawaz Hussain went to Gadkari, sometime in the late summer of 2015, “and said, ‘What is this government you are running? I devoted my entire life, despite being a Muslim, to this party. Every week I have been asking for an appointment to meet the PM, but in vain.’ Gadkari replied, ‘Shahnawaz, why are you asking me? He is a man who met his mother after two years.‘”
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“EARLIER, THE BJP WAS A POLITICAL PARTY,” a leader who played an important role in the party when Gadkari was the president told me. But since Modi became prime minister, and Amit Shah took the party presidency, “it has a quasi-corporate structure, with a chairman, who is an executive chairman, and a CEO, who is a full-time CEO.”
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The BJP leader with a major role in the party under Gadkari offered another before-and-after comparison as well. “Earlier, the Sangh had a lot more say,” he said. Now, it has been reduced to the job of a human-resource manager. They recommend people, but the CEO arbitrarily takes decisions. But at the same time, the RSS has never had it so good. People are suddenly interested in the RSS. They also don’t want to upset the apple cart.”
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Modi “represents the communal approach,” Kanate said, while “Gadkari’s conviction is not in communal politics.”3
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At a massive celebration for his sixtieth birthday in Nagpur in 2017, Gadkari quoted, as he occasionally likes to do, the former US president Richard Nixon. “The man is not finished when he is defeated,” he told the crowd, “but he is finished when he quits.” He also shared what he called his motto in life: “Don’t break the rules, bend the rules.”
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Gadkari, Kanate added, “understands that this Modi mania will wear off. Pyaz se laya hua bukhar hai, utar jaayega”