The assassination in Mumbai of high-profile NCP chief Baba Ziauddin Siddique is a tragic commentary on the regulation and order state of affairs in a progressive state like Maharashtra, which boasts of getting the perfect police pressure in India.
What’s extra surprising is that the menace to Siddique’s life was no secret. He had been supplied Y-category safety. The audacity displayed by the gangsters in capturing a senior politician within the coronary heart of India’s monetary capital additionally raises a query mark about governance within the state.
A local of Gopalganj in Bihar, Siddique was a politician with a happy-go-lucky persona, who simply made pals throughout occasion traces. A socialite from Bandra West, the constituency he represented three phrases (2000 to 2009), Siddique rose up the political ladder, from being a Youth Congress activist to councillor, MLA to state minister.
He was recognized for throwing lavish iftar events at which the who’s who of Bollywood, business and politics had been friends. Siddique was instrumental in ending the dispute between Bollywood stars Salman Khan and Shahrukh Khan and bringing them collectively once more.
Siddique’s assassination exhibits the hollowness of the ruling Mahayuti alliance’s hole guarantees a couple of zero-tolerance strategy to crime in Maharashtra.
As soon as upon a time, Mumbai was infamous for gang wars — a characteristic which, at instances, prolonged to an unsavoury nexus between crime and politics. Following Siddique’s dying, the police are carefully watching the position of the Lawrence Bishnoi gang, given the politician’s closeness with Salman Khan, who can be a goal.
Siddique, who joined the NCP in February this 12 months, ending his 48-year- lengthy affiliation with the Congress occasion, was going to be one of many star campaigners in mobilising Muslim votes for the Mahayuti, particularly Deputy CM Ajit Pawar’s faction, which is struggling to maintain its secular credentials intact, regardless of partnering with saffron events — the BJP and Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena. In Siddique, the BJP and Shiv Sena had envisaged a dilution of Muslim anger, at the very least in these few constituencies the place their particular person candidates have cordial relations with minorities.
With the state going to polls subsequent month, Siddique’s killing casts a shadow on the Shinde-led Mahayuti’s tall claims of fine governance. Importantly, it badly dents the picture of Deputy CM and Residence Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who has already come below extreme assault from the Opposition concerning law-and-order failure within the state. Extra so, when he’s being projected inside the BJP because the unchallenged chief — maybe, even the following CM — if the alliance is voted to energy.
In a fiercely contested election for 288 Meeting seats, with a three-party coalition on both aspect, the Mahayuti versus the Maha Vikas Aghadi — each incident, huge or small, goes to matter for Maharashtra.
shubhangi.khapre@expressindia.com
