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Politics Behind The Creation Of Ministry Of Cooperation With Amit Shah In Driver’s Seat -Syed Khalique Ahmed

-IndiaTomorrow.net

NEW DELHI: Many people were surprised when Union Home Minister Amit Shah was given the additional charge of the newly created Ministry of Cooperation. The Cooperation Ministry was earlier a part of the Ministry of Agriculture.

But it was no amazement for those acquainted with how the cooperative movement plays a role in politics – state as well as national politics – and how BJP used the cooperatives from the state to the village level to strengthen its grip over the state politics in Gujarat that has kept the Congress out of power since 1995.

Although BJP had captured political power and formed its government in the state, it felt that it has no complete grip over the state power structure because cooperatives with an annual turnover of thousands of crores of rupees were still in the hands of the Congress leaders, having immense influence over the voters through cooperatives in rural and semi-rural areas. The charge to break the stranglehold of the Congress over Gujarat’s cooperative movement was given to Amit Shah when, barring one cooperative bank, all other cooperative banks and institutions were under the control of Congress. Amit Shah’s strategy helped the BJP wrest control over all the cooperative institutions in the state, thus throwing the Congress out of power from every institution in the state: from Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF) with an annual turnover of Rs. 39,000 crores, Amul and other milk dairies, to cooperative banks and agriculture market committees.  This helped BJP establish its political strength and influence in rural and semi-rural areas as well. Amit Shah himself got elected as chairman of the Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank that attracted national headlines when it secured deposits of Rs. 745.59 crores of spiked or banned currency notes within five days after the announcement of demonetization by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the night of November 14, 2016.

Each of 18,000 villages in Gujarat has a ‘mandali’ or what is known as a cooperative society that is directly involved in the procurement of milk from milk producers and supply of agricultural inputs as also providing micro-finance facilities through primary agricultural credit societies (PACSs) to the farmers. These cooperative societies having many office-bearers have immense influence over the local villagers. “This network at village level helps the political parties to propagate their messages, convince the voters at the micro-level about the policies of the political party and bring people to polling booths to vote in their favour,” says Kailash Gadhvi, a Congress leader and a chartered accountant by profession. He says that “the politics and cooperatives are linked.” Gadhvi’s opinion is supported by a research article titled “Cooperatives and Politics” authored by researcher BS Baviskar and published in March 23, 1968, edition of Economic and Political Weekly. Baviskar says that “…..cooperatives perform certain latent political functions which are significant from the point of view of the political development of a democratic society.” Baviskar’s conclusion is based on his study of the cooperative movement in rural Maharashtra. Baviskar also quotes Fred Longden, a British politician of the Labour and Cooperative party, supporting his thesis. Longden says that “cooperatives should play an active role in politics.”

And Baviskar’s study is not wrong because the basic political strength of Sharad Pawar, Maharashtra’s political strongman, and his family lie in control over cooperative institutions, particularly cooperative sugar mills, in Western Maharashtra. Former Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis of the BJP once told media persons that though BJP was in power in Maharashtra, the cooperative institutions that controlled the local economy were in the hands of the NCP and the Congress. Several other Maharashtra leaders, including Vasantdada Patil, D R Gadgil, V E Vikhe Patil, Tatyasaheb Kore, Ratnappa Kumbhar,  Annasaheb Shinde, Yashwantrao Mohite, Shankarrao Mohite Patil, Shankarrao Kale, and Shankarrao Kolhe rose to state and central politics owing to their association with the cooperative movement in Maharashtra.

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(The article first appeared in Madhyamam, a Malayalam-language multi-edition daily published from South India and the Gulf countries. It was published on the paper’s English website also.)