Amidst the political uncertainty over who the next chief minister of Maharashtra will be, the role of Ajit Pawar who is the legal claimant of the Nationalist Congress Party now can’t be understated. Ajit has already made his move by supporting the BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis to lead the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) or the Mahayuti government in the state – a wily gambit to de-centre chief minister Eknath Shinde in the coalition.
There could not have been a better time to assert his position within the NDA for Ajit, whose NCP was the worst performer in the recent Lok Sabha polls. The BJP currently sits comfortably as the leader of the alliance with 132 seats. With the half-way mark at 144, the support of the NCP with 41 seats is more than enough for the NDA to form a government.
In such circumstances, Shinde may not be able to flex his muscles for the chief ministerial chair in the way he did when he broke away from the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena in 2022. Perhaps, that explains why Shinde went overboard in his monologue on November 27 to hand over all decision-making powers to the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah, at once forcing the top two BJP leaders into a moral quandary while positioning himself as Fadnavis’s immediate competitor.
In such a game of wits, as the winners are thirsting to get the largest pie in the power-sharing model, Ajit has proven that he wasn’t ever a pushover, even when he had to face a humiliating loss a few months ago. Not only did he recover from the crisis, but he went on to outmanoeuvre his uncle and founder of the NCP, Sharad Pawar, at every stage of the elections. Sharad Pawar, also widely known as the original “Chanakya” of Indian politics, struggled to match his nephew’s guile and craftiness, while Ajit assumed a mission-like zeal to prove himself as the true inheritor of the NCP.
The Pawar family had always divided roles. While the senior Pawar navigated the corridors of national power, the nephew was trusted to consolidate the state, especially in the NCP’s pocket borough of Western Maharashtra, or what is known as “Desh”. Ajit used his deep links in the region, democratised local leaderships in his strongholds, and concentrated on fighting a limited number of seats (53) and winning them to consolidate his position in the NDA. He was always known to have a better hold than anyone in the Pawar family on regional dynamics. The assembly election found him on home turf, and he knew it right from the start.
As Shinde’s popular Ladki Bahin Yojana was spoken about with huge excitement in the run-up to the polls, Ajit did something that may have punctured the INDIA bloc or the Maha Vikas Aghadi’s political narrative entirely. In an interview to senior journalist Sreenivasan Jain, Ajit dropped a bombshell. He alleged that the senior Pawar was also present in a 2022 meeting, which was being mediated by the industrialist Gautam Adani to get the NCP to support a BJP-led government, after Uddhav Thackeray had withdrawn from the NDA. Later, Sharad Pawar confirmed being present at the meeting with Amit Shah at Gautam Adani’s house where the BJP assured both the Pawars that cases against his party leaders would be dropped if NCP agrees to cross over.
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Pawar was ostensibly offering a justification for his switch, but he ended up stripping the Congress-led coalition of its ideological heft. It was time when the Congress leaders like Rahul Gandhi had narrowed down their attack on the NDA around the alleged Modi-Adani nexus. Gandhi was talking about an unforeseen spurt in parasitical business monopolies during the Modi regime, with allegations of corruption and financial fraud against the Adani group at its centre point. Ajit’s revelation, in a way, pitted the INDIA bloc as a group of disparate political forces borne out of convenience against a more cohesive NDA coalition for common voters.
As Ajit consolidated the regional dynamics of western Maharashtra and deflated the INDIA bloc’s narrative, he also went on to curry some favour with a significant section of Muslims by openly objecting to the BJP’s Hindutva campaign. As the results came in, the data clearly indicated that he turned out to be the most significant reason for the NDA’s unprecedented majority in the state assembly. The CSDS-Lokniti’s post-poll survey showed that 22% of Muslim voters backed the Mahayuti – a gain of 10 percentage points from the Lok Sabha elections.
The BJP-Shiv Sena coalition is considered natural in Maharashtra. Together, they crossed the majority mark comfortably in 2014 and 2019. But it was the NCP that played the greatest role behind the NDA’s mammoth majority this time. Data also shows that the BJP has been slowly gaining significant ground in the Pawar family’s bastion of western Maharashtra. Ajit, with his striking performance in the 2024 assembly polls, has also managed to gain some control over the region, even when he is a part of the NDA.
The roles in the Pawar family have reversed at the moment. While Ajit has led his NCP with sharp tactical thinking, he has also compelled his quick-witted 84-year-old uncle to hit the ground once again to rebuild support for his faction of the NCP and his daughter Supriya Sule. After the electoral outcome, however, Ajit will have the equally astute Shinde as his primary regional challenger, as both may have to compete with each other at every step in a government steered by the dominant BJP.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
