When Maharashtra’s Home Minister R R Patil first mooted the transfer of Bombay’s police commissioner Arup Patnaik a day after some Muslim groups ran riot at the Azad Maidan on August 11, 2012, I am told, Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan told him, “If Patnaik goes, so do you”. Read more

During his first term as chief minister of Maharashtra, I had once quizzed Vilasrao Deshmukh about the general feeling of critics that his was a lack-lustre government that was really incapable of doing anything significant for the people. Read more

When Sharad Pawar split the Congress in 1999, he had hoped that the whole of the party will rally behind him and that Sonia Gandhi will be just left with herself and a handful of her close supporters. Read more

Someone asked me the other day: do you think any action will be initiated against the ministers named in the land scam in Maharashtra by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG)? Read more

In the 1980s, Chhagan Bhujbal, the then Shiv Sena’s lone MLA in Maharashtra, coined a famous term that has stuck in the minds of many people of that time: ‘bhukhandache Shirkhand’. In other words, he was accusing then chief minister Sharad Pawar of licking up a lot of land (more than 200 plots in Bombay, in fact) that had been de-reserved by him for unknown reasons. Read more

Sharad Pawar is wont to describe the Congress party thus: it is like a zamindar of yore. When he used to sit on his terrace with a hookah he had the satisfaction of knowing that all that met his eye and far beyond belonged to him. Read more

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Socialist. Read more

Recently I ran into a friend of union minister for science and technology Vilasrao Deshmukh who told me the latter had been quite incensed with his recent cabinet colleague Gurudas Kamat. Read more

In recent years, Chhagan Bhujbal has been Maharahstra’s toughest Home Minister, even willing to take on Bal Thackeray and throw the Sena supremo into the slammer. Read more

I have never quite heard of something like this – the Deputy Chief Minister of a state not on talking terms with the Chief Minister because his lollipop was taken away, not by the CM but by a third party which was well within it’s rights to do so. Read more