This election is Munde’s opportunity to prove herself after a stormy five years since she lost the Parli assembly seat in Beed to NCP’s Dhananjay Munde, Gopinath Munde’s nephew, in 2019. The BJP, at the time, did not accommodate her in the state legislative council.
Pankaja Munde’s moment in the sun, however, comes at a steep cost.
She has replaced her younger sister, incumbent MP Pritam Munde, as the BJP candidate and is now “desperate” to win, she tells ThePrint.
“Right now, I just want to win, desperately. I have no other thing on my mind. I don’t know what I am eating. I don’t know what I am drinking. I don’t know how much I am sleeping. I only want to win this election for my people because many people are waiting for my victory,” Munde tells ThePrint before setting off on a string of street corner meetings.
To her advantage, Munde has the support of the only other claimant on her father’s legacy, Dhananjay Munde, in this election.
Dhananjay Munde walked out of the BJP in 2013 to join the NCP and is now with the Ajit Pawar-led faction, which is in a coalition with the BJP and the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena.
For Pankaja Munde, the only spanner in the works is the Maratha community’s pressing demand for a quota and the inability of successive state governments to grant it.
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‘Consolidation of votes on Maratha vs OBC line’
The incumbent Eknath Shinde-led state government passed a resolution in the state legislative assembly for a standalone Maratha quota in February. However, the verdict is still out on whether it will stand the test of judicial scrutiny.
The Maratha community, meanwhile, is demanding reservation through the Other Backwards Category (OBC) quota, claiming all Marathas were originally Kunbis. While the state government machinery has been granting Kunbi certificates to eligible Marathas, the demand for extending this benefit to all “sage soyare (relations by birth or marriage)” is still under state consideration.
Maharashtra’s OBCs, meanwhile, have been opposed to the demands. Munde belongs to the OBC Vanjari caste, while her opponent, Bajrang Sonwane, is a Maratha. His party, NCP (SP), is in a coalition with the Congress and Shiv Sena (Udhhav Bal Thackeray).
This time, on the back of multiple agitations by Jalna-based Maratha quota leader Manoj Jarange Patil, several districts in Marathwada could see a consolidation of votes on the Maratha vs OBC line, leaders from both communities across party lines tell ThePrint. The Beed constituency, with its significant Maratha population, is no exception, they say.
While time and again, Munde alleges that her opponent is making this election about caste, Sonawane refutes the claim. “I am a Maratha, but that doesn’t mean OBCs are not with me. I don’t think there is polarisation. I don’t know who is taking this election on caste lines. It should not be the case,” he told ThePrint last month.
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Gopinath Munde card vs quota headwinds
At the entrance of Kesapuri Parbhani, a bunch of villagers greet Pankaja Munde and march behind her to the venue of the corner meeting in what looks like a mini rally.
At the curb just before the entrance to the village is a large hoarding with a blow-up poster of Jarange Patil, declaring “gaon bandi (no entry into the village for politicians)”.
“The Maratha reservation issue is strong, but Gopinath Munde ‘saheb’ has an immense following here. He always took everyone along,” Ganesh Badhe, who came to Kesapuri Parbhani from the nearby Gawandara village, tells ThePrint.
It is this respect for senior Munde and a sense of “injustice” meted out to his legatees — daughters — that Pankaja Munde and her campaigners are capitalising on.
At the corner meeting, Rajendra Mhaske, BJP’s Beed district president, says everyone in Beed had a dream to see Gopinath Munde as Union minister.
“This dream was even fulfilled. But he unfortunately could not work as a minister. He unfortunately passed away. If we have to complete Gopinath ji’s dream, we have to send Pankaja tai to the Parliament,” he says.
However, the fact that Gopinath Munde’s younger daughter Pritam has been MP for two terms but still did not make it to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet remains unsaid. When Modi expanded his cabinet in 2021, he picked another leader from the Vanjari community in Maharashtra — Bhagwat Karad — to be a part of it.
At another corner meeting, Munde narrates a recent encounter with a farmer at Mauj village. She tells the crowd that during her address to 30-odd villagers, a farmer got to his feet to tell her she had enough “sangharsh (conflict)” in her life.
Munde says the farmer went on to say that she is suitable for several posts that eluded her, but her supporters from the village — all loyalists of Gopinath Munde — are praying for her victory this time.
Munde’s “conflict” with her party comes up each time she or her sister gets overlooked for a position. For instance, when then chief minister Devendra Fadnavis stripped her of the water conservation portfolio under which his flagship Jalyukt Shivar scheme was launched in 2016, when she did not get a nomination during the MLC elections in 2020 or 2022, or during the 2021 cabinet expansion when the BJP leadership picked Karad as a minister of state over her sister.
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‘Feel uncomfortable talking about caste, religion’
Speaking to ThePrint, Munde says this election season, across “progressive” Maharashtra, the caste factor has dominated conversations, which is unfortunate.
“I feel very uncomfortable talking about caste and religion because I wasn’t brought up that way. In my house, my party, or my culture, we never discussed that or uttered these things on a dais or a public forum, which is happening a lot this election, which is very unfortunate,” Munde says.
The former MLA has been facing the headwinds of the Maratha agitation during her campaign, with the Maratha community members showing black flags, sloganeering, and posting on social media about the issue. Bothered by this backlash, Munde asks at a campaign rally in Patoda, “Am I from Pakistan or Bangladesh (that I get such treatment)?”
To ThePrint, she says she has simply been explaining to people “in a language they understand” that the Maratha quota should not be an issue for the ongoing Lok Sabha elections and that it is a state-level issue.
At a corner meeting in Beed’s Mainda village, she tells a small crowd, “You are all very intelligent. ‘Jaati sathi maati khau naka. Jaati sathi gulab jamun kha, Puran poll kha, pedhe kha (don’t eat crow in the name of caste; eat gulab jamun, puran poli and pedha instead)’.”
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‘Sister and I are one unit’
Pankaja Munde tells ThePrint that she feels “tremendously sad” replacing her sister and that BJP’s decision to drop cousin Poonam Mahajan, late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan’s daughter, is also “shocking”.
The BJP replaced two-time MP Poonam Mahajan from the Mumbai North Central seat with former public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam, who fought the Pramod Mahajan murder case.
Munde says, “As a sister, I definitely feel bad. But, as a leader, I believe and trust that the party has plans for her too.”
Moreover, she says, she never aspired to contest the Lok Sabha polls and wanted to see her sister score a hattrick from their father’s old seat. But, she adds, neither is there any backlash from the people of Beed nor any misgivings within the family about the party’s decision.
She says, “The way we conducted ourselves in the last ten years, it was never the two of us (it was them as one unit). So, I was always a leader, and she was always a good Member of Parliament — a well-sorted combination.”
“It was quite hard on me as an older sister to take a younger sister’s place emotionally. But, at home, everything is perfectly fine. It did not take us one second to accept this,” she says. Adding, “At least Pritam did not have to suffer the turbulence of defeat like I did.”
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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