The tick-tock of the Pawar family clock Premium

Vitthal Maniar discusses family rifts in Sharad Pawar's political legacy, highlighting Ajit Pawar's ambitions and the NCP's future.

“Saheb is definitely hurt that importance was given to personal political ambitions over the family,” says Vitthal Maniar, 86, sitting in his office in a crowded lane of Nana Peth in Maharashtra’s Pune. Saheb is Maniar’s college friend and NCP (SP) chief Sharad Pawar, who turned 84 on December 12, 2024. Maniar had fought and lost a college election against Sharad, but gained a lifelong friend. The families are so close that Ajit Pawar, 65, Sharad’s nephew, calls him Kaka (father’s brother).

Maniar is referring to the “personal political ambitions” of Ajit, who is now holding the post of Deputy Chief Minister for the sixth time. In mid-2023, Ajit had split from the centrist Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), co-founded by Sharad in 1999, taking along with him a majority of its MLAs. He then joined hands with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena, partners in the ruling Mahayuti alliance.

Since its inception, the NCP has never formed a government on its own, though it has almost always been part of the ruling alliance in the State. It has been one of the strongest regional forces, an umbrella under which sugar barons and regional satraps from resource-rich western Maharashtra gather. Sharad has been Chief Minister four times and his family has businesses in sugar, other agro-industries, realty, and the media.

Today, the Pawar empire is in flux, with six members of the family in active politics and the third generation keen to prove its mettle. While the ongoing tussle between uncle and nephew has drawn national attention, at the heart of the family disruption is the question of who will inherit Sharad’s six-decade-old political legacy.

Ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha poll, Ajit’s faction was given the NCP’s name and ‘clock’ symbol. Sharad’s group, NCP (SP), was treated as a faction and allotted the symbol of ‘a man blowing a trumpet’ (tutari vajavnara maanus in Marathi). While the matter is sub judice, it was a blow to the patriarch. Days after his trusted aides left him, reporters asked Sharad who was with him. He promptly raised his own hand and smiled.

In the Assembly election to 288 seats in November 2024, the NCP won 41 out of the 56 seats it contested, while the NCP (SP) secured only 10 out of the 86 seats it contested. For the first time in his political career, Sharad, who has never lost an election he has contested, did not address mediapersons the day the results were declared.

The next day, he said at a press conference that the results were “unexpected”, but he would not resign from politics. “That is a call that my colleagues and I will take. There was clear polarisation of votes in this election,” he said in Karad, where he goes every year to pay tribute to his political mentor and the first Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Yashwantrao Chavan, on his death anniversary. “People say the use of money during this election was unprecedented,” he said.