At the crossroads

By Mahesh Vijapurkar

BACK IN the late 1940s, the late Vittalrao Vikhe-Patil, whose son, Mr. Balasaheb Vikhe-Patil, is now Union Minister, visited Vaikhuntbhai Mehta, Cooperation Minister in the erstwhile Bombay State, to plead that the Government evolve norms for support through contribution to the cooperative sugar factories' share capital. When Mehta demurred, he fished out a five-rupee note - a grand sum those days - and put it on his table. He asked the Minister to send someone out to fetch some poison since ``I cannot go back and face my farmers who have given their bit for the dream of a cooperative sugar factory''. That triggered quick policy making and the Government-cooperatives relationship in Maharashtra blossomed. Vikhe-Patil emerged as the doyen of the movement in agro-processing, theoretically its control vested with the farmers, and later received the Padmashri. Now he is known in Ahmednagar, his area of influence, as ``the Padmashri''.

After that, the cooperative sugar movement expanded to encompass the State and became one of the main avenues for rural development. An alliance was worked out between the Congress(I) and the sugar barons which kept every other political line-up out of the movement by denial of patronage. In short, it became the brick and mortar of the ruling establishment, which till 1995 was the Congress(I). The Government turned a blind eye to every misdemeanour of the sugar barons. But after 45 years of that cosy relationship, things changed. Exactly 50 years after Vikhe- Patil's pioneering spirit and effort set up the first cooperative, the sprawling movement is at the crossroads.

With over 110 factories working, a third of them sick, about 30 more under various stages of implementation, this sector, with an output of 65 lakh tonnes of sugar in the just-ended season, after an all-time high sugarcane production of 60 million tonnes, is in a fix. It ``needs'' to retrench the more than half a million farm hands and replace them with mechanised harvesters to ``remain viable'' and has moved in that direction. Its future is troubled because the Government can no more play guardian angel.

Today, the sugar cooperatives are faced with the need to become efficient and be able to compete because de-licencing has sparked a race for setting up factories in the private sector; the ruling elite is no more able to control their spread by limiting it to its favoured cronies. And those who control cooperatives have, in turn, procured IEMs to squat on locations within 15 km of their existing empires - there is a stipulation that no sugar factory can come up within 15 km of an existing one - and prevent others from elbowing in. Leaders such as Mr. Babanrao Pachpute, the Nationalist Congress Party's Maharashtra unit chief, even set up an apex body of private sector hopefuls. It is a free for all and let the devil take the hindmost.

But that is not all. Politically, the cooperative sector has politically really opened up, ending the era of cronyism. With the assumption of power by the Shiv Sena-BJP in 1995, the last five years have seen a lot of changes in the enormous matrix of this cooperative power structure. Many of the barons shifted affiliation, the first and foremost among them being Mr. Balasaheb Vikhe-Patil and his son, Mr. Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil moving to the Sena. Those earlier kept out of the movement suddenly found that they could edge in and the race began.

Mr. Gopinath Munde, then the BJP's Deputy Chief Minister, with his rural background and political savvy, quietly began the attack on two levels: he enabled those who wanted to switch sides to do so and simultaneously encouraged efforts by new entrants to try and establish their own cooperatives. This helped break the Congress(I) monolith by inducing political migration of cooperative barons and threw open the sector which was hitherto a closed club. Today, with a sugar factory in his home turf of Ambejogai in Beed, Mr. Munde has emerged as a major player in the sector.

The Shiv Sena did not much understand the rural dynamics of sugar politics because of its own urban preoccupations and preferences and allowed the BJP to gain ascendancy in this sector even as the Congress(I)'s control further broke down with its split and the emergence of the NCP. The NCP, under Mr. Sharad Pawar's stewardship, controls more sugar cooperatives than the Congress(I) but between them they now share the establishment, alarmed at the encroachment on their turf by the BJP-Sena. No wonder, when that alliance was tinkering with this landscape, everyone screamed that the movement was being derailed.

In 1995 during an election, a BJP worker in Karad was only too keen to speak of his party's serious bid to come to power but when asked if he had anything to do with a sugar factory had this to say: ``You must be joking. If you are a Congressman, you are a brahmin in that sector, otherwise, an outcaste.'' But he added a prophetic rider: ``if at all our party, our alliance comes to power, then we would expect this sector to be opened up to us.'' For, close by was an example of how people had to pay a price for not being in the Congress(I): Mr. Yashwantrao Mohite-Patil, an old PWP hand, had to leave his party before he was helped to set up a sugar factory in the 1960s.

There, of course, was an exception. The present Maharashtra chief of the Samajwadi Party, Mr. Nagnath Naikwadi, was enabled to sponsor a cooperative sugar factory by the late Vasantdada Patil, on the premise that Mr. Naikwadi, being a old freedom fighter who helped the famed Satara- based parallel Government in the 1940s, deserved a leg up. That was the ostensible reason but the wily Maratha had another unspoken agenda. Mr. Naikwadi's plant was located close to one run by Mr. Rajarambapu Patil, a political foe of Vasantdada Patil. But that, till the Sena-BJP's advent, was the only example of an ``Opposition sugar factory''.

Such was the tyranny of the establishment on the ``outsiders'' who dared to dream of their own cooperative that Mr. Sambhaji Pawar, who always won from Sangli on the Janata Dal ticket, had to abandon his seat and remain neutral during elections post-1995 just to avoid jeopardising his cooperative venture having been blessed with a licence with the intervention of Mr. V. P. Singh. It needed a non-Congress(I) Government in New Delhi as well for change even on a minor scale. It is actually a pent- up aspiration now exploding in Maharashtra, every taluk, every leader, wants a sugar factory.

It is in this context that Mr. Munde's emergence as a competent entrepreneur - who kept his costs down, went in for a lean staff, strength and computerisation and crushed more than his capacity of 2,500 tonnes a day in the very first year of his factory's operation - gains importance. To a sector that is plagued with excessive staff, loose fiscal management, that renders the cooperatives sick but keeps the barons rich, this was like a breath of fresh air. Others who are setting up new plants are willing to imitate. If nothing else, this should be most satisfying to ``an outsider''.

It is poetic justice that Mr. Munde should be the new role model. But it has its own situational explanation. For long, the sugar barons thrived on ``I will not squeal on you if you allow me to run my fiefdom'' and even the Chief Ministers spoke of the ills in the sector but only warned of action - this never came. Now that the sector has truly opened up, and the BJP-Sena strives to takeover existing cooperatives through elections, those like Mr. Munde will have a place.

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