Dashed hopes and distrust swirl around Beed's wind farms

Don Quixote famously mistook them for enemies, and from a high vantage point the windmills that dot the fields in the villages of Patoda, Kej and Ashta in central Maharashtra do resemble giant sentries on guard. But if Quixote was tilting at imaginary enemies, windmill farms across the region of Beed have, in real life, turned into deadly battlegrounds.

- Nadeem Inamdar

PUNE/BEED:

Last week's resignation of Dhananjay Munde, the Maharashtra minister for food and civil supplies, after the arrest of his close aide Walmik Karad for the alleged torture and murder of a village sarpanch (chief) has laid bare a sordid tale of extortion, forced disappearances and murder, and exposed caste fault lines.

In the last year-and-a-half, Beed has emerged as the epicentre of the agitation for Maratha reservation, leading to regular skirmishes and social boycotts between the Maratha community and the Other Backward Classes (OBCs), of which the Vanjaris are the dominant community. For three decades the political fortunes of the region have been controlled by Vanjari clan members of the late Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Gopinath Munde.

His daughter Pankaja is a BJP minister in the state cabinet while his nephew Dhananjay was a minister from Ajit Pawar's Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). Last month, the charge sheet filed in the murder of village sarpanch Santosh Deshmukh, a Maratha, details how Munde's aide and election manager Karad maintained a stranglehold on the local economy. He cornered most work contracts for the state-run thermal power project, the fly-ash business, sand mining, and also most civil work. Karad has been the election manager for Dhananjay Munde, a two-term lawmaker from Parli who was also Beed's guardian minister.

It's in this context that the killing of Deshmukh became a flashpoint that eventually cost the minister his job.

Where tensions emerged About five years ago, the Maharashtra government made a determined push towards clean energy. After land in Sangli and Satara became scarce and expensive, the hilly terrains of Kej, Ambajogai, Patoda and Sautada, rising 750 metres above sea level, were identified as ideal places to develop wind energy farms.