New Delhi, July 29: He was born a Maharashtrian, made it to Parliament twice from Gujarat and nursed Varanasi after Narendra Modi's victory from the Uttar Pradesh constituency last year. Now Chandrakant Raghunath Patil has added one more state to his résumé - Bihar.
Patil has been picked by BJP national chief Amit Shah to oversee the upcoming Bihar Assembly elections as general secretary Bhupendra Yadav's co-minder.
A hat too many? Not for the man who organised the Surat auction that saw the monogrammed suit the Prime Minister wore during President Barack Obama's visit this January being picked up for Rs 4.3 crore.
Today, miles away from the hammer and hustle of auctions, the 60-year-old Patil has opted to live in near seclusion in Bihar's Begusarai till the last vote is cast in the elections, due later this year.
That's the mandate handed out by his bosses, Shah and Prime Minister Modi. Patil, after all, has been one of their favourite backroom managers and executors in elections.
So, while those like Rajiv Pratap Rudy and Piyush Goyal dominated the public space in the Maharashtra polls, few, if any, knew that it was Patil who worked with Shah from the innards of the BJP's war room in Mumbai.
Patil was born a Maharashtrian, but his family had adopted Gujarat as their home province four generations ago and made Surat their base. "I know Gujarat inside out. I cannot say the same for Maharashtra," says the Jalgaon-born Patil.
Gujarat has been his political turf since 1990 when he quit a job as a constable in the state police. Patil twice won the Lok Sabha election from Navsari, about 40km from Surat - the south Gujarat commercial and political hub that is giving Mumbai competition as a magnet to draw migrants from the north and the east, with Bihar contributing the largest numbers.
"You can say large parts of Surat are mini Bihars. Patil has cultivated the migrants and gets their votes," says Gujarat BJP official Jagdish Bhavsar.
In June 2010, after Nitish Kumar had snubbed Modi by cancelling a dinner he had planned to host for the BJP's national executive in Patna, Patil claims he had made it his "mission" to take this "betrayal" to Surat's Biharis.
That year, he organised the Bihar centennial celebrations in Surat and invited Modi, then the Gujarat chief minister, as the chief guest. "The Biharis there were bowled over and made up their minds that very day to vote the BJP in the elections thereafter," Patil says.
Patil does not speak Bhojpuri or Maithili. "My Hindi is good enough," he says, adding that there was a "political energy" to Bihar that made work "exciting" for him.
"It is a poor state, certainly poorer than Gujarat, but the people are highly conscious politically," he says.
But Patil has had to work hard to earn his spurs with Modi.
He started out as a loyalist of the late Kashiram Rana, who for long was the Surat MP from the BJP and a fierce Modi opponent.
According to Gujarat BJP sources, in the late '90s when Modi crafted a strategy to return to the state, he began to nurture his followers in every district. In Surat, he eyed Patil who had by then earned a reputation as a political dynamo, adept at raising coteries of the faithful.
Once Modi became chief minister in late 2001, Patil switched camps. His proximity to Modi, however, did not prevent his arrest for defaulting on a loan repayment of Rs 54 crore.
Patil, who helmed the city's Diamond Jubilee Cooperative Bank, had to pay the entire amount with interest on a Supreme Court order. "I was out of trouble," he says.
Patil nursed the Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency after Modi's win last year, got some of the ghats spruced up and developed Jayapur, the village Modi adopted near Varanasi.
But he was reticent over another "contribution" of his - the auction where Modi's pinstriped suit went under the hammer.
