The tragic flaw? Sharad Pawar side-lining Ajit in NCP led to nephew's second rebellion
Maharashtra Assembly Elections to the 288-member cabinet are due to be held in 2024. Hints of unease within the NCP ranks rose when Sharad Pawar's daughter Supriya Sule joined politics in the 2009 parliamentary elections. Another irritant for the Ajit camp was the entry into politics of Pawar’s grandnephew Rohit Pawar.
Rohit contested and won the last Assembly election. Notably, Ajit had been elevated to the rank of Maharashtra cabinet minister in 1999, nine years after he served as a junior minister as an NCP member. This is not the first time that Ajit Pawar has rebelled within the NCP ranks.
An attempt in 2019 had fizzled out within days, however, nephew Ajit Pawar had always maintained a passion to carve his own political legacy, different from uncle Sharad Pawar's handcrafted political stint spanning almost half a century. Ajit has left the NCP stunned in 2004, when he publicly differed with the party leadership’s decision to concede the chief ministership to the Congress despite emerging as the single-largest party. In 2012, he suddenly resigned as Deputy CM over accusations of irregularities in irrigation projects during his tenure as the water resources minister, jeopardising the future of the Congress-led government as other NCP ministers threatened to follow suit. At the time, Pawar senior stepped in to save the government.
Weeks before the last Assembly elections, Ajit broke down in public over the Enforcement Directorate naming him and Pawar in a money-laundering case, claiming he was hurt. He subsequently resigned as MLA and went incommunicado. Pawar’s decision to step back from contesting the 2019 Lok Sabha elections was said to have stemmed from Ajit’s insistence on fielding his son Parth from Maval.
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