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 Minister. The party which SS had backed against Congress (I), the “enemy number 1” had itself joined that “enemy number 1”! It was a serious breach of trust for all the workers of SS who had campaigned against the Congress (I) and for PDP. The irony was that even after all that had happened, Joshi had backed Pawar once again in later years, praised him as “Gorbachev of India” and formed an alliance with his party. This just reveals how Joshi was falling short of understanding political battles. This second move of Joshi, after the Lok Sabha elections, also turned out to be disastrous. Joshi had put down in an article his overall political policy. Though he did it some years later, the points he made had all along guided him. He wrote : 1. The purpose of Sanghatana is not to capture political power; because even the children of farmers don’t remain on the side of the farmers once they get political power. 2. Exploitation of farmers is the basic tenet of the current system. Irrespective of which party comes to power, this basic tenet would not change. In short, for a farmer, all political parties are thieves. 3. Farmers can get fair price for their produce only on the support of their united strength; and not through any elections. But we should use elections to increase the strength of our movement. What policies we should adopt so as to use elections for that purpose can be decided separately before each election. 4. It is impossible to have a long term friendly relationship with any one party on the basis of virtues it possesses. However, we shall have to maintain some relationship with different parties by considering which party is a bigger thief and which is a lesser thief. We shall have to ensure that none of these anti-farmer parties becomes all powerful. On Political Front

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