Among the many decisions that stoked a controversy during his long stint as Maharashtra’s cabinet minister and deputy chief minister was Raosaheb Ramrao Patil’s move to ban gutkha in the state in 2006. It was contested in the courts, overturned, but later upheld. What a cruel irony then that RR Patil, 57, died of oral cancer in a Mumbai hospital on Monday. In his death, the Nationalist Congress Party lost its most earthy mass leader.
Laid low by the disease, Patil had all but withdrawn from public life late last year as he sought treatment from a panel of doctors in his adopted city. Not even the most aggressive line of treatment could pull him back from the brink. The Maharashtra government declared a day’s state mourning and prepared to extend full state honours at the cremation scheduled in Patil’s village of Anjanigaon.
Patil, called Aaba by political colleagues and friends, was revered in his village in Tasgaon taluka in Sangli district of Maharashtra’s relatively rich western belt of sugarcane cultivation. In Mumbai, where he worked in three successive governments from 1999 to 2014 – with a break of about 10 months in between – Patil had become the symbol of the much-reviled and mocked moral police as he went about banning this and capping that.
Ousted after 26/11 attack
In 2004-05, Patil banned dance bars in Mumbai. That decision would return to haunt him in 2013-14 when the Supreme Court finally overturned the decision. Then, there was the ban on gutkha, an act that he believed he was undertaking with the most noble intentions but had not bargained for the backlash from the powerful gutkha lobby and free-choice campaigners. In 2004, Patil invited the wrath of free speech activists when he banned historian James Laine’s volume Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India but neither prevented an attack by Maratha groups on the prestigious Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune nor brought the attackers to book.
His most controversial remark, of course, was the one he made in the wake of the 26/11 terror attack in Mumbai in 2008. “Badein badein shehron mein aise choti choti batein hoti rehti hain” (In large cities, such minor incidents keep occurring) was the line that cost him his job as the state’s deputy chief minister and home minister. He belaboured the point later that he had been misquoted by the media but he had damaged himself. In October 2014, during the Assembly election campaign, he remarked of a rival candidate that “he should have first won the elections and then raped”. He quickly apologised.
Patil’s influence as Maharashtra’s home minister would need a deeper analysis of data and crime trends during the last 10 years. He brought his own image of an upright politician to bear on the department that was rocked by the involvement of IPS officers and other policemen in the fake stamp paper scam masterminded by Abdul Karim Telgi.
The unstated policy of police encounters as a way of dealing with Mumbai’s underworld was given a quiet burial during his tenure. The spectre of saffron terror as right-wing Hindu outfits indulged in bomb-making experiments was unearthed in his time, and officers credited him for extending unstinting support. And in these scam-tainted times, nobody pointed a finger of suspicion at him. However, Maharashtra police was not amongst the most efficient or best managed forces and Patil’s wish list was often overrun by his political bosses.
Rise from a humble background
A quiet sort, Patil was not given to seeking attention to himself within the NCP but he had the eye and ear of his mentor and party chief Sharad Pawar. When Pawar loosened his grip over the state affairs in the last few years and yielded control to nephew Ajit Pawar, Patil found himself politically marginalised. He was among the few second-rung leaders who could have posed competition for the younger Pawar. He was seen as a true-blue mass leader and an orator of some repute in rural Maharashtra, but dispensable as a power broker in Mumbai. Lately, Patil seemed resigned to his considerably reduced sphere of influence in the top echelons of the party.
In the NCP, as well as on the larger political firmament, Patil was seen as an unvarnished politician. Many wondered if he was putting on the act. He was not. Unlike the wealthy landlord farmers that made the top leadership of the NCP, and earlier Congress, Patil came from a peasant family whose members worked as farm labourers. He himself had earned daily wages on sites under Maharashtra’s Employment Guarantee Scheme. His family was hardly seen in Mumbai and he preferred to educate his children in the zilla parishad school back home.
Consequently, his public profile in Mumbai remained that of a village politician who did not quite comprehend the rhythms and power of India’s commercial capital. Or its reference points of work and leisure. Patil believed he was doing society a favour by keeping evil temptations out of Mumbaikars’ life and was unable to understand the backlash for quite some time. On the other hand, his initiatives in rural Maharashtra – a state-wide cleanliness campaign and a disputes-free village campaign – earned him the accolades he sought. To the end, he remained the country fellow who made it big in the city but never quite understood what made cities pulsate with life.
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Laid low by the disease, Patil had all but withdrawn from public life late last year as he sought treatment from a panel of doctors in his adopted city. Not even the most aggressive line of treatment could pull him back from the brink. The Maharashtra government declared a day’s state mourning and prepared to extend full state honours at the cremation scheduled in Patil’s village of Anjanigaon.
Patil, called Aaba by political colleagues and friends, was revered in his village in Tasgaon taluka in Sangli district of Maharashtra’s relatively rich western belt of sugarcane cultivation. In Mumbai, where he worked in three successive governments from 1999 to 2014 – with a break of about 10 months in between – Patil had become the symbol of the much-reviled and mocked moral police as he went about banning this and capping that.
Ousted after 26/11 attack
In 2004-05, Patil banned dance bars in Mumbai. That decision would return to haunt him in 2013-14 when the Supreme Court finally overturned the decision. Then, there was the ban on gutkha, an act that he believed he was undertaking with the most noble intentions but had not bargained for the backlash from the powerful gutkha lobby and free-choice campaigners. In 2004, Patil invited the wrath of free speech activists when he banned historian James Laine’s volume Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India but neither prevented an attack by Maratha groups on the prestigious Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune nor brought the attackers to book.
His most controversial remark, of course, was the one he made in the wake of the 26/11 terror attack in Mumbai in 2008. “Badein badein shehron mein aise choti choti batein hoti rehti hain” (In large cities, such minor incidents keep occurring) was the line that cost him his job as the state’s deputy chief minister and home minister. He belaboured the point later that he had been misquoted by the media but he had damaged himself. In October 2014, during the Assembly election campaign, he remarked of a rival candidate that “he should have first won the elections and then raped”. He quickly apologised.
Patil’s influence as Maharashtra’s home minister would need a deeper analysis of data and crime trends during the last 10 years. He brought his own image of an upright politician to bear on the department that was rocked by the involvement of IPS officers and other policemen in the fake stamp paper scam masterminded by Abdul Karim Telgi.
The unstated policy of police encounters as a way of dealing with Mumbai’s underworld was given a quiet burial during his tenure. The spectre of saffron terror as right-wing Hindu outfits indulged in bomb-making experiments was unearthed in his time, and officers credited him for extending unstinting support. And in these scam-tainted times, nobody pointed a finger of suspicion at him. However, Maharashtra police was not amongst the most efficient or best managed forces and Patil’s wish list was often overrun by his political bosses.
Rise from a humble background
A quiet sort, Patil was not given to seeking attention to himself within the NCP but he had the eye and ear of his mentor and party chief Sharad Pawar. When Pawar loosened his grip over the state affairs in the last few years and yielded control to nephew Ajit Pawar, Patil found himself politically marginalised. He was among the few second-rung leaders who could have posed competition for the younger Pawar. He was seen as a true-blue mass leader and an orator of some repute in rural Maharashtra, but dispensable as a power broker in Mumbai. Lately, Patil seemed resigned to his considerably reduced sphere of influence in the top echelons of the party.
In the NCP, as well as on the larger political firmament, Patil was seen as an unvarnished politician. Many wondered if he was putting on the act. He was not. Unlike the wealthy landlord farmers that made the top leadership of the NCP, and earlier Congress, Patil came from a peasant family whose members worked as farm labourers. He himself had earned daily wages on sites under Maharashtra’s Employment Guarantee Scheme. His family was hardly seen in Mumbai and he preferred to educate his children in the zilla parishad school back home.
Consequently, his public profile in Mumbai remained that of a village politician who did not quite comprehend the rhythms and power of India’s commercial capital. Or its reference points of work and leisure. Patil believed he was doing society a favour by keeping evil temptations out of Mumbaikars’ life and was unable to understand the backlash for quite some time. On the other hand, his initiatives in rural Maharashtra – a state-wide cleanliness campaign and a disputes-free village campaign – earned him the accolades he sought. To the end, he remained the country fellow who made it big in the city but never quite understood what made cities pulsate with life.