On Maharashtra Day, at the expansive Gandhi maidan in Kolhapur, there was an assembly of colours and symbols unseen in the 64 years of the state’s political history. Flags of the Congress, the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray faction), the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi, the Communist Party of India and the Aam Aadmi Party, all of whom had been vicious rivals for much of the state’s history, dotted the venue together. Workers of each of the parties swarmed in through the evening to lend support to a 76-year-old debutante in politics, the Congress’s Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj—the twelfth descendant of Shivaji, a seventeenth-century Maratha king, and the great grandson of Rajarshi Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj, the first king of the Maratha empire in the princely state of Kolhapur.
Many of the district’s prominent establishments are named after Rajarshi Shahu—highly regarded as an anti-caste reformer for introducing scholarships for students from backward castes and for founding Vedic schools to make the study of scriptures accessible to non-Brahmins. In the Bahujan movement in Maharashtra, Shahu’s name is often uttered in unison with those of Jotirao Phule and BR Ambedkar. The Maha Vikas Aghadi, an alliance founded by the Nationalist Congress Party’s chief Sharad Pawar to take on the Bharatiya Janata Party in Maharashtra, sees an all-round acceptability in nominating Rajarshi Shahu’s descendant for the Lok Sabha polls. Additionally, Prakash Ambedkar’s VBA had exited the alliance in March after failed seat-sharing negotiations and is contesting against the MVA in other constituencies. It did not nominate anyone from its party in Kolhapur, choosing to back Shahu’s campaign.
This is the first time in over twenty-five years that someone from the Kolhapur Lok Sabha constituency has filed a nomination from the Congress. It had long been a bastion of Sadashivrao Mandlik, who had been elected from Kolhapur between 1998 and 2014—much of it with the NCP, though in 2009 he stood as an independent. In that election, he had quit the NCP when the party ticket was given to Sambhajiraje, the son of the current MVA nominee Shahu.
This story was originally published in caravanmagazine.in. Read the full story here.
