Pravin Darekar, a prominent Maharashtra leader, is frequently seen with Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and has now become a significant figure in Maharashtra politics. Ahead of the 2024 Maharashtra Assembly elections, the BJP has put forward one of its prominent Maratha leaders to counter Manoj Jarange Patil, who led the Maratha reservation movement in the state. The BJP has fielded Pravin Darekar, expecting concrete results in the upcoming elections, and has taken measures to address the Maratha reservation movement.
The BJP’s initiative aims to improve its political image and counter Manoj Jarange Patil’s demands for Maratha reservation. Darekar, a Maratha politician, has been tasked with improving the party’s anti-Maratha image and has openly attacked Jarange Patil, who accused him of propping up the Maratha Thok Morcha, a social outfit fighting for Maratha reservation, to engineer a split in his agitation and divide the community.
Darekar started his political career with the Shiv Sena student organization. A B.Com. graduate from Mumbai University, he entered politics as a member of the Shiv Sena’s students’ wing, the Bharatiya Vidyarthi Sena (BVS), which was then led by Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) founder Raj Thackeray. In 2005, he followed Raj into the MNS and became one of its founding members.
In 2009, Darekar made his electoral debut as an MNS candidate from the Magathane Assembly constituency but lost to Sena’s Prakash Surve five years later. He quit the MNS in 2015 and joined the BJP, a move met with confrontation by some within the party. His rise in the BJP under Fadnavis has also seemingly not gone down well with some old-timers in the party.
Having started his political career with the Shiv Sena’s students’ wing over three decades ago, Pravin Darekar was elected as an MNS MLA and then switched to the BJP, serving as the Leader of the Opposition in the Maharashtra Legislative Council.
Darekar, from the Maratha community, gained attention when he took on Maratha quota activist Manoj Jarange Patil on the controversial Maratha reservation issue, which is likely to have a significant impact on the Assembly polls later this year. The Maratha community’s sentiments on the quota issue contributed to the BJP’s poor performance in the recent Lok Sabha polls in Maharashtra, where the party’s tally dipped from 23 in 2019 to nine.
However, Darekar found support from some leaders within the party. He also faced disappointment as the BJP rejected his requests for an Assembly ticket in 2019 and denied him a berth in the Eknath Shinde Cabinet. His tenure as the chairman of the Mumbai District Central Cooperative Bank (MDCCB) between 2015 and 2022 was marred by controversies, with allegations of financial irregularities.
He was accused of faking his status as a laborer to get elected as a representative of the MDCCB, an accusation he has repeatedly denied as baseless and politically motivated. He was booked in 2015 on charges of cheating and criminal conspiracy. During the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government’s tenure, he was disqualified by the registrar of cooperative societies, an order he challenged in the Bombay High Court but later withdrew.
In 2022, an FIR was filed against Darekar for allegedly forging documents to show him as a laborer, even as his 2016 MLC election affidavit described him as a “businessman/entrepreneur.” Darekar also faced criticism from the BJP during the 2009 and 2014 Assembly polls and flak from the MVA after his switch to the BJP. After Shinde assumed charge in June 2022, Darekar returned unopposed as MDCCB chairman, and in December that year, the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) gave him a clean chit in the 2015 case.
