Decision on Chavan exit after Obama visit

NEW DELHI: Though the dice remains loaded against Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan’s continuance in office, the impending visit of US President Barack Obama is likely to offer a brief respite from the storm kicked up over the Adarsh society scam.

It was indicated on Tuesday that the Congress high command will not move on the case for Chavan’s exit till the high-profile American visit gets over on November 8. The two-member committee of senior ministers Pranab Mukherjee and A K Antony would have submitted its findings by then.

The process of examining of files relating to decisions taken by Maharashtra government in legalizing an illegal multi-crore housing society in Mumbai’s plush Colaba area is merely a process as the leadership needs to take the political decision to replace him.

The mood of the leadership seems to be in favour of change as the defence offered by Chavan so far has not really washed. He has been hard put to explain as many as three flats being allotted to his relatives even as the CM has claimed that the land on which the society came up was government owned.

The argument that the society had come up on what was originally revenue land may not hold much water given the manner in which the scheme progressed with official connivance and blatant offer of flats to bureaucrats and politicians who pushed the society’s various clearances. Also, unlike Chavan, other former CMs are not so directly linked to allotment of flats.

AICC general secretary Digvijay Singh said a decision could not be taken on basis of a “media trial” while power minister Sushil Kumar Shinde agreed that he had signed the Adarsh file as CM but needed to see how it had progressed since. “It happened six years ago, I need to see the file as it looks today,” he said.

Unless the high command takes the view that getting rid of Chavan may end up creating more problems, the CM remains on the edge. With the momentum the alleged scam has gained makes it difficult for the leadership not to act in the Adarsh case. As things stand, two likely replacements are former CM and central heavy industries minister Vilasrao Deshmukh and MoS in PMO Prithviraj Chavan.

But the Congress will have to get down to the nitty-gritty of choices once the decision to remove Chavan is taken. In the meanwhile, it became clear that it had been DMK’s T R Baalu and not Shiv Sena’s Suresh Prabhu who as central environment minister cleared the Adarsh file in 2003. When contacted, Baalu said it was the state government’s case and snapped the telephone connection.