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Pawar, who warned Tendulkar, was silent on Deshmukh | India News


Veteran politician Sharadchandra Govindrao Pawar recently suggested to renowned cricketer Sachin Tendulkar “to be careful when talking about issues related to other fields.”
Pawar completed his SSC in 1958 from the Maharashtra State Board and went into politics to serve the country. Tendulkar also dropped out after the tenth class to serve India through cricket. Both have achieved enviable laurels in their fields.
Baramati’s seasoned Maratha politician has earned recognition across party lines for his lean thinking to retain voters for more than half a century, resisting changing electoral mandates. Tendulkar received praise for his ability to survive and score prolifically as he took on hostile, swinging and spinning spells from great players around the world to emerge as one of the best cricketers.
An 80-year-old Pawar certainly has the experience to advise a 47-year-old Tendulkar to be cautious when tweeting in defense of the country at a time when anyone who speaks out for or against farmers’ agitation fuels a fierce counterattack of internauts. .
Tendulkar was nominated for Rajya Sabha in April 2012 when Pawar was the minister of agriculture, a position he held for a record 10 years in the UPA government. In the history of independent India, no politician had held this position for more than five years. That, plus Pawar’s roots in land politics, coupled with a bit of foray into cricket as a manager, gave him the authority to even cajole the Indian cricket demigod.
Pawar has been vociferous about the plight of farmers and harshly criticized all three farm laws since they were enacted. Despite admitting that he proposed reforms similar to legislation in the past, he supported protesting farmers who have stepped on Delhi’s borders for the past two and a half months.
When Pawar was the Union’s agriculture minister from 2004 to 2014, the statistics on farmer suicide would have made him a sad person. Between 1995 and 2014, nearly three lakhs of farmers committed suicide across the country, being the Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh cemeteries.
In Pawar’s political backyard, the number was alarmingly high. Given the fact that the strong man’s heart from Maratha bled for the farmers, he was expected to work tirelessly to improve the plight of the farmers and mitigate their difficulties to enable them to dream of a better life than prefer death.
Unfortunately, on average, 3,685 farmers in the state took their own lives each year between 2004-13, which was 42% more than the annual average of agricultural suicides recorded between 1995-2003. Well, there were no social media and committed lawyers to scorch him with vitriolic trolling or attack him via PIL in the Supreme Court.
Interestingly, when Pawar was minister of agriculture, former Maharashtra chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh was recruited into Manmohan Singh’s cabinet in May 2009.
A year and a half later, the Supreme Court in ‘Maharashtra vs Sarangdharsingh Sivadassingh Chavan’ criticized Deshmukh, for protecting money lenders while he was the CM of the state.
In that trial, the SC had spoken of hundreds of farmers who preferred death rather than being tortured by moneylenders in the Vidarbha region. He had said: “This being the fundamental reality, as CM of the state and as occupying a position of great responsibility as a high constitutional official, Vilasrao Deshmukh certainly acted beyond all legal norms in instructing the collector to protect the members of a particular family dealing with money loan business from the normal legal process.
“This amounts to giving a special favor to a select few at the expense of the large number of poor people who, as farmers, have borrowed and turned to law enforcement,” he had said.
Even after the SC’s stinging indictment, Deshmukh continued as a minister in the then UPA government and Pawar had not expressed any public advice to the then prime minister, as he did in the Tendulkar case, on the precaution of retaining a man. considered anti-farmer by the highest level. cut of the earth.

Times of India