The men at the table near the village pond were laughing. On the desk between them, a pile of loose paper chits. A shuffle of faces and names cut by an assistant at the village panchayat office. Using a ruler, he sliced hundreds of large photocopies into thousands of smaller. Then he organised them for convenience. “If you don’t have a card, you can go vote with this slip,” he said then, not looking up.
The gang gathered themselves into a parody of prim behaviour when other villagers sought help. Then the unwinding began anew. In their mind, the election was settled. Who else will win it, one of the men said. “Vivek Patil’s party.” A stretch of the legs, a lean backward, a grin. Done deal.
Vivekanand Shankar Patil was somewhere out there in the hilly, dusty Maharashtra countryside, traveling with an entourage of fervent supporters from one voting station to another, bolstering candidates with his presence. He was a political fixture. The first election he won from Panvel was two decades ago. He won the couple that followed, by margins so wide they dismissed debate. Five years ago he stood for office in a neighbouring constituency, Uran, and the distance between him and the nearest contender was over 20,000 votes.
As a representative, Patil’s public posture was built on some kind of morality. In the assembly he passionately argued that his rivals were thieves. In 2005, he tabled a motion in the state’s lower house, calling attention to the dance bars in his home district of Raigad. His political outfit, the Peasants and Workers Party of India, held protests and demanded a ban, which was met five months later.
During his time in office, Patil’s worth grew splendidly. His returns mirrored the region’s dramatic prosperity. In two terms, his wealth leapt from Rs 2 crore to over Rs 56 crore, and his holdings included farmland, commercial real estate, and four apartments (two of which he did did not mention in earlier declarations). Readers of the local newspaper he published, Dainik Karnala, grew familiar with his smiling face. In the fortnight before the election, the front page was a publicity vehicle for Patil and his party; his picture was published on it no less than twenty times, with multiple appearances on the same day. He posed, in one photograph, with over a dozen posters of himself. Awash in its owner, Karnala declared that the area was a sea of red, the party’s colour.
At Dapoli, a senior officer who had served with a UN peacekeeping mission in Serbia surveyed lines of voters shuffle into a school. He arrived in a white Scorpio and played with his phone while muscular subordinates marched about in dark glasses, frowning at the playground and the boys mimicking celebrities in voting day pictures. The officer and his convoy travelled from village to village, watching for evidence of manipulation. “We get calls about people distributing money. But when we get there, we don’t see anything. There seems to be nothing here,” he said. “But it happens. It happens.”
While Patil campaigned in Uran, his most vital candidate in Panvel was a man named Balaram Patil. They applied stubborn stickers next to house doors. They shared prime space in the newspaper. Day after day, while Balaram’s words argued for better governance, his image impressed upon readers and people entering their own home his tired eyes and a smile with nothing behind.
Balaram lost. In the next taluka, Patil was without office for the first time in two decades. I did not think much of it until a fortnight later, when Mahendra Patil, a former sarpanch at Paragon, a Panvel village, claimed that entire villages had pretended to be away when Patil arrived to campaign. “Our wives said, ‘We don’t need to listen. Shut the windows’,” Mahendra told me. “Patil lost because we were angry about what he did.”
Mahendra’s answer was convenient, and of course there was more to the matter. This was a year of great change in politics, and we were not far along enough in history to be kind to the deposed.
But Mahendra’s point was simple: Patil was their representative, and so he had to face the weight of their anger for what happened back in 2013. Dislodging him for five years was just mild retribution for the severe inconveniences his actions brought upon them that November day. The denials did not matter. Patil had to be punished.
