MANIKRAO KADAM is a busy man these days, his schedule full of meetings and trips across Maharashtra. Kadam is the newly appointed state chief of Bharat Rashtra Kisan Samithi, the farm wing of Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) helmed by Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao. And, with the general elections around the corner, he has been entrusted with the task of spreading the party’s reach in the neighbouring state.
An old hand in the farm politics of Maharashtra, Kadam has chosen his homefront Marathwada as the BRS launchpad. It’s a calculated move as several districts of the dry and arid region share history and a border with Telangana. Kadam was earlier with Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana, the farm outfit founded by former MP Raju Shetti.
With Rao already addressing two public meetings in Maharashtra, Kadam now is busy preparing for the third meeting to be held in Sambhajinagar. “This would be a meeting which would be talked about for years to come,” he said.
With no love lost between Rao and the BJP at the Centre, senior BRS leaders are busy flying between Hyderabad and other state capitals to forge a non-Congress, non-BJP third front. In Maharashtra, the groundwork has been left to people like 51-year-old Kadam, who hails from Parbhani.
According to Kadam, he was invited by Rao’s office a year ago after the CM saw him talking about the “Telangana model” on TV. Unlike Maharashtra, Kadam says, farmers in Telangana have access to 24-hour electricity, and schemes like Rayathu Bandhu (where a farmer is provided a fixed amount of money every year) and the Kaleshwaram irrigation project have impressed him.
“The (BRS) call came out of the blue. At first, I thought it was a joke,” Kadam said, adding that he was invited to visit Telangana and track the farm schemes first-hand. A proposal followed: Join BRS, head its farm wing and introduce the party in Maharashtra.
Kadam says while Maharashtra has reported the maximum number of farm suicides, Telangana has zero such cases. This, he says, is mostly due to the social security net that the BRS government provides. “Even before I joined the party officially, I had talked about such a net to help the farm sector,” said Kadam.
And, in an age when the politics of identity and religion has taken centrestage, Kadam says livelihood and economics still resonate with the common man. “While our farmers continue to suffer, right across the border in Telangana, farmers enjoy a better life — all I have to do is to explain how this was possible… I have travelled around 28,000 villages in the state and covered the length and breadth of Maharashtra twice. Till date, I have reached out to over 2,000 families of those who committed farm suicide in Maharashtra,” he said.
With an eye on general elections, Kadam says his outfit already has support on the ground. Already, he points out, a stream of leaders and public representatives has joined the BRS and its farm wing: former MPs Haribhau Rathod and Dharmanna Sadul, and 10 sitting corporators from Parbhani.
“We have managed to set up branches in all the 288 assembly constituencies in Maharashtra and will contest elections — from local bodies to Lok Sabha polls from Maharashtra. But at present, we are busy in preparations for the Sambhajinagar Sabha. We have to make it the best-ever in the state,” he said.
