Issues are more important than ideologies. I am an activist and am good at it, says Ajit Nawale. (Photo: Janak Rathod)
At the forefront of last week’s march by farmers to Mumbai was an Ayurvedic practitioner and hospital owner who, during his student days, had collaborated with both the right and the left, depending on which side was backing the issues he was raising on campus.
Dr Ajit Nawale, 40, who took a lead role in mobilising marchers and took part in discussions with the state government, is today the Maharashtra state general secretary of the CPM-affiliated All India Kisan Sabha. As a BAMS student in Ashtang Ayurveda College in Pune in the 1990s, he had taken part in movements that involved the left-wing SFI as well as the right-wing ABVP, including one in which the two student bodies, he claims, took up an issue jointly.
“Since the beginning, I have been of the view that issues are more important than ideologies. The issues need to resolved, people should get relief,” said Nawale. Yet, he insisted that he is not a political person. “I am an activist and am good at it,” he said.
Nawale, who runs his hospital in Nawalewadi of Ahmednagar district, is the son of a former clerk in a sugar factory who took to farming after retirement. He lives with his parents and brothers’ family in Nawalewadi. Nawale is married to Archana, his BAMS college-mate.
He had wanted to study MBBS. He says he scored 91% in class XII in 1994, but it was not enough for a seat in the unreserved category. After joining BAMS, he soon ventured into activism. “I started Yuva Kranti Forum to take up issues for farmers; children and help them find hostel accommodation, get scholarships etc,” Nawale said.
This was when caught the notice of the RSS. “A person from the RSS got in touch with me and I started working with the Sambhaji Nagar (Deccan Gymkahan) shakha in Pune. I also worked with ABVP,” he said.
When Ayurveda students took up a movement against discontinuation of an EBC scholarship, Nawale and others teamed up with the SFI. “We thought it would not possible for a single organisation to get students’ issues resolved, so we held joint protests with the SFI. The ABVP did not take up this issue,” Nawale said. “I took part in several protests with the SFI because I felt the EBC scholarship was an important issue. But I didn’t agree with some of the views of the SFI at the time, so I continued working with the ABVP.”
Later, he says, the ABVP and the SFI held joint protests demanding a separate Ayurveda university and raising other issues. “The Shiv Sena-BJP government was in power,” he said. “We blockaded a road in Hutama Chowk and were arrested. The ABVP did not come forward to help me; the SFI helped in my release. It impacted me a lot,” he said. He then started working with the SFI.
In 2001, Nawale completed his course and returned home, where he started an SFI local unit and also set up his hospital. “In 2005, I joined the All India Kisan Sabha and started taking up issues relating to milk, onion, sugar, BPL rations cards with others at local level,” said Nawale, who became a member of the AIKS state committee in 2007.
“In 2016, we held a protest over issues of forest land, minimum support price and implementation of the Swaminathan Commission report,” he said. “With others in Nashik, we mobilised around 1 lakh people. It changed the language of the Kisan Sabha. We started taking on the government directly and held protests in Aurangabad, Thane and Buldhana.” That was the year he was made the state general secretary.
Last June, he was part of a farmers’ strike that stopped milk and vegetable supply demanding a loan waiver. “I was part of the steering committee of farmers’ organisations and several issues were resolved. We successfully got a loan waiver announcement from the government,” he said. “But there were several issues pertaining to implementation, so we called the long march from Nashik to Mumbai.”