One of the many who graduated from cadre to leader in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ecosystem built by the dual leadership of the late Manohar Parrikar and Shripad Naik in the 1990s, Sadanand Shet Tanavade who has now earned a seat in the upper House of Parliament, has come a long way - from sarpanch to MLA to State party president and now Member of Parliament.
We had him over in our newsroom this week, where we had the opportunity to chat and there were some interesting anecdotes he recounted. Most of them were “off-the-record”. However there’s this one, where he won his first election and was disqualified for being under-aged, we cannot resist but print.
It was in 1991 that Tanavade contested his first election and got elected as panch of the Pirna panchayat. However, it so happened that he was just 24 years and a few months old at the time when the minimum qualification age was 25. He got disqualified.
However, when all formalities were done and the bye-election was held later, he had already celebrated his 25th birthday and so he contested and won again. He went on to become sarpanch.
A decade later, his elevation to MLA at the 2002 election, a race in which he was the dark horse surprised many punters and analyst. It was the election in which Dayanand Narvekar abandoned Tivim and moved to Aldona, fearing the tough challenge from current Fisheries Minister Nilkant Halarnkar. But it so turned out that Halarnkar, who was the favourite to win, ended up runner-up falling short by some 500-odd votes.
Tanavade had arrived and his one term in the House was rather colourful, donning the cap of the typical street-smart ‘karyakata’ in the fore-front of the infamous ‘Hotel Mandarin’ episode and a few weeks later the episode in which a crowd of karyakatas accosted the then Governor SC Jamir at the gates of Cabo Raj Bhavan when Parrikar’s government was dismissed in 2005..
He now moves on to Delhi to the House of Elders. Good luck in doing the bidding for Goa in the Council of States.
