Explained : From Gandhi cap to saffron badge: Politics shifts in Ahilya Nagar and Its Impact

In 2011, a retired army man from what was then Ahmednagar district sat on a hunger strike at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption protest turned him into one of India’s most recognisable figures overnight. Along with his fame travelled a piece of headgear: the white Gandhi cap, printed with “Mai Bhi Anna” (I too am Anna) and worn by lakhs across the country. That was the first time in decades anyone had modified a cap long associated with the freedom movement—a symbol of sacrifice and national service.

Since then, the cap has been repurposed many times. In the last few years, Hindu Right organisations have been pushing a saffron version of the same Gandhi cap. Electorally ambitious politicians have followed suit, wearing it to signal alignment with what they read as the temper of the masses. The latest to do so is Prajakt Tanpure, a former Minister of State in Maharashtra and a leader of the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar) faction, from the very same Ahilya Nagar district.

Tanpure’s supporters in the Rahuri Assembly constituency, which he represented between 2019 and 2024, have been circulating a photograph on WhatsApp groups. In it, he wears a saffron Gandhi cap and a matching gamchha around his neck. A caption reads: “Real Hindu Right Winger MLA is coming to assembly”. Tanpure has not made any public statement yet. He is reportedly trying to get a BJP ticket for the byelection scheduled on April 23. But this much is already clear: the race for Rahuri is turning on a single question. Whose shade of saffron is darker?

The cooperative cradle

Making Ahilya Nagar a laboratory of saffronisation has been a systematic project of Hindu Right groups backed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The results became visible after the BJP came to power at the Centre in 2014. The party, functioning as the RSS’s political arm, used its position to strengthen its organisation on the ground, with the help of multiple sister organisations. One of its principal tools was communal polarisation. In Ahilya Nagar, that polarisation has worked its way down to the village level. But its vehicles have been the district’s long-standing feudal families.

The political scientist Rajni Kothari described these families as beneficiaries of the “Congress System”. At the start of independent India, the government adopted a mixed economy model. Its agrarian counterpart was the cooperative movement. Ahmednagar district was its cradle. In 1948, Vitthalrao Vikhe Patil, a farmer from Loni in the district, organised the growers of 44 villages around Pravaranagar and set up what would become Asia’s first cooperative sugar factory, commissioned in 1950.

The idea changed the lives of millions of farmers in Maharashtra. Over the decades, the State became the country’s cooperative hub: sugar mills, cotton mills, dairies, banks, and even schools, and colleges ran on the cooperative model. Ahmednagar became one of Maharashtra’s largest sugar-producing and milk-producing districts.

As the rural economy organised itself around the cooperative sector, rural politics followed the money. The new politicians of the first and second decades after Independence were freedom fighters in their youth who now held complete control over the rural economy of their areas. The Congress was the principal beneficiary of this political economy, but Ahmednagar also had a strong representation of the CPI (M) and the Peasant and Workers Party. The CPI(M) won three Assembly seats in the district in 1962 and two in 1967.

Ahmednagar was not only a centre of the cooperative movement but also a district with an imprint of progressive values that emerged from the freedom struggle in the early twentieth century. The district adjoins Pune, which was a centre of the independence movement. The Ahmednagar fort held Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, P.C. Ghosh, and other Congress leaders arrested during the Quit India movement of 1942. Nehru wrote The Discovery of India in this fort. These events left a mark on the district’s political culture. The Congress was the vehicle of these developments, and as it became the party of power, the feudal families of Ahmednagar stayed aligned with it for decades.

Feudal families, shifting loyalties

The moment the Congress began losing its control, the feudal lords started detaching themselves. When Atal Bihari Vajpayee became Prime Minister for the third time in 1999, Eknathrao “Balasaheb” Vikhe Patil—son of Vitthalrao Vikhe Patil, the cooperative sugar mill pioneer—became Minister of State for Finance in his government. Balasaheb had been a Congress leader but joined the Shiv Sena led by Bal Thackeray in the mid-1990s, when the BJP–Shiv Sena alliance came to power both in Maharashtra and at the Centre.

After 2004, he returned to Congress. His son, Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, served as a Minister in subsequent State governments. Between 2014 and 2019, Radhakrishna was the Leader of the Opposition from the Congress in the Maharashtra Assembly. In 2019, he left the party and joined the BJP. He is now the Guardian Minister of Ahilya Nagar district.

The Vikhe Patils—a family with enormous political and financial clout—joining the BJP and receiving important posts sent a signal to other feudal families in Maharashtra, and in Ahilya Nagar in particular. Sangram Jagtap, the NCP MLA from Ahmednagar city, picked up the cue quickly. When the NCP split in June 2023, he sided with Ajit Pawar. Jagtap had been getting elected since 2014. In 2014 and 2019, he managed to win by leaning on secular identity politics; he needed Muslim votes to survive.

But in 2024, as a candidate of the BJP-led Mahayuti alliance, he dropped the secular façade and turned into an openly Hindu hardline figure. He addressed a Hindu Sakal Samaj Morcha rally and spoke so aggressively against the Muslim community that he became a favourite of Right-wing supporters across Maharashtra. The Hindu Sakal Samaj Morcha, which started in September 2022, claims that Hindu girls are being deceived into marrying Muslim youths—a theory the Hindu Right calls Love Jihad.

Manufacturing communal flash points

As politicians pushed to polarise the electorate, a series of communal controversies began erupting across the district from 2022 onward. One centred on a dargah at Guha village in Rahuri tehsil. The Hazrat Shah Ramzan Mahi Savar Dargah had long been a place where Muslims and Hindus paid their respects—part of the district’s syncretic tradition.

Hindu Right organisations claimed the structure was originally a temple of Saint Kanifnath, one of the nine saints of the Nath sect, and that it had been converted into a dargah after the Mughal conquest. In December 2023, a mob of hundreds of right-wing activists installed an idol of Kanifnath inside the dargah. The incident polarised the surrounding area.

Prajakt Tanpure was the MLA from Rahuri at the time. Shivajirao Kardile, who defeated Tanpure in the November 2024 Assembly election, publicly backed the idol installation. The polarisation helped Kardile win. He died of a cardiac arrest on October 17, 2025, and the April 23 byelection is being held for the vacant seat.

The history of many dargahs in Ahmednagar district is deeply intertwined with Maratha history. Ahmednagar has been a place where Hindu and Muslim cultures met and mingled. The Ahmadnagar Sultanate was established in 1490 when Malik Ahmad Nizam Shah declared independence from the Bahmani Empire. In 1494, he laid the foundation of the city on the Deccan Plateau and named it after himself. His court was served by figures such as Shahaji Bhosle, father of the Maratha king Shivaji.

The name Shahaji itself is a product of the Deccan’s culture of coexistence. According to tradition, Malojiraje, Shahaji’s father and Shivaji’s grandfather, had no children for a long time after his marriage and went to seek blessings at the dargah of the Sufi saint Shah Sharif in Ahmednagar. He pledged that if blessed with a son, he would name the child after the saint. Years later, when he became father to two sons, he named them Shahaji and Sharifji.

The RSS and its frontal organisations have been chipping away at this syncretic tradition for years. The BJP has been its political beneficiary. Renaming Ahmednagar as Ahilya Nagar was part of the same project. The district was renamed in May 2023 after Ahilyabai Holkar, the eighteenth-century ruler of Indore, whose birthplace falls in Chaundi village of Jamkhed tehsil in the district.

In her lifetime, Ahilyabai was known as a Maratha queen. The Holkars belonged to the Dhangar (shepherd) community, and over time, Ahilyabai has become a symbol of OBC and Dhangar politics. The RSS has been projecting her as a Hindu icon—principally because she built the Kashi Vishwanath temple ghat and riverfront in Varanasi. But in the historical record, Ahilyabai was a ruler who helped build not only Hindu temples but also mosques. Her secular credentials are erased in the retelling.

The renaming thus met two purposes: it removed a Muslim name from the map, fitting the BJP’s anti-Muslim politics, and it helped the party court the Dhangar community.

Jawaharlal Nehru, who created and nurtured the “Congress System,” used to wear a white Gandhi cap. Balasaheb Vikhe Patil wore the same cap, as did an entire generation of Ahilya Nagar’s political class, including Shivajirao Kardile. That generation is fading from politics. The new leadership wears the Gandhi cap too, but in saffron. The cap may help their politics for now. But a symbol of harmony and sacrifice has been traded for a badge of vengeance and division—a choice that history is unlikely to judge kindly.

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