The Jain who would have been King

Suresh Jain’s missed shot at Maharashtra’s top post had little to do with his faith and everything to do with backroom arithmetic.

Jalgaon: In Maharashtra’s never-ending political theatre, few tales have endured with such puzzling elasticity as the claim that Jalgaon strongman Sureshdada Jain was reportedly denied the Chief Minister’s chair just because he was a Jain. This story, resurrected recently by MNS president Raj Thackeray for the second time since January 2023, is as persistent as it is misleading. Such whispers that play on identity and prejudice offer a reductive explanation for a far more tangled web of realpolitik.

After all, Shiv Sena founder the late Balasaheb Thackeray and Mukesh Patel, the two men central to the story, are no longer alive to clarify. And having written Sureshdada’s biography based on verifiable fact (which was praised by the man himself as “excellent”), I owe it to the record to separate invention from reality.

To those familiar with Maharashtra’s coalition churn in the mid-1990s, the true story is neither obscure nor ambiguous. After the 1995 state assembly elections, the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance found itself staring down the barrel of arithmetic defeat. With just 125 seats—20 short of a majority—the ruling coalition needed to cajole or coerce 20 independents to stay afloat. The Sena’s local lieutenants, not known for the finesse required in such delicate operations, were quickly outmanoeuvred by the Congress-NCP camp led by Vilasrao Deshmukh and Sharad Pawar.

The Jain factor

Sureshdada Jain, a seasoned Congress defector, had not only crossed over to the Shiv Sena but had earned Balasaheb Thackeray’s rare trust. The late Mukesh Patel, a loyal Shiv Sainik and strategist, had strongly urged Thackeray to make Jain the Chief Minister. Why? Because Jain had already demonstrated his cross-party prowess. Alongside Patel and the Dardas—Vijay from Nagpur and Rajendra from Sambhajinagar—he had once engineered a Rajya Sabha win for Vijay Darda against stiff opposition from Sharad Pawar himself. For Balasaheb, still smarting from Congress’s attempts to reclaim power, that was proof enough.

Thackeray did not hesitate. “Try,” he reportedly told Jain, thus greenlighting the mission to round up independent MLAs. But by then, most had already gravitated towards Pawar’s camp. The numbers did not add up, and the plan had collapsed. The Chief Minister’s chair remained elusive not because Sureshdada was from the Jain community, but because Pawar, Deshmukh and cold electoral math had already closed the window.

Balasaheb’s strategy

The charge of religious discrimination rings especially hollow when viewed against Balasaheb’s own conduct. Not only had he wooed Jain into the Sena fold, but he also appointed him Minister of Trade and Commerce (hardly a token portfolio) and later, Housing Minister after being inspired by Jain’s housing initiatives in Jalgaon. If Thackeray had indeed been wary of Jain’s religious identity, such appointments would never have followed.

Former BJP veteran Eknath Khadse claims Balasaheb opposed Jain due to his “businessman mentality”.

Political narratives often serve more as strategic assets than as historical accounts. One version invokes Prakash Javadekar as a ‘messenger’ while another features Khadse and Nitin Gadkari. The dramatis personae change, but the intended punchline remains unchanged, which is that Sureshdada didn’t fit the image.

And yet, Jain’s own record speaks of loyalty and risk-taking rarely seen in Maharashtra politics. He quit his Congress MLA seat to join the Sena. Later, when Sharad Pawar tried to lure him back with the promise of a ministerial berth, he refused. Instead, he marched back to Matoshree, resigned again and re-contested the election on a Sena ticket, winning once more.

Those spinning theories of faith-based exclusion ignore these inconvenient facts. They also gloss over the most obvious truth that politics is rarely governed by idealism or identity alone. Power, in Maharashtra as elsewhere, is often a function of timing, numbers and transactional trust. Jain may not have become Chief Minister, but it was not because of his religion. He simply played a game that was already lost.