Sharad Pawar and Ajit Pawar: Family Feud

SUPE IS AN OVERGROWN town in western Maharashtra that stands at the crossroads of many important places in the state. Take the road west, and you will reach the temple town of Jejuri, and, further on, the cities of Pune and Mumbai. Go north, and north Maharashtra and its cities of Nashik and Jalgaon will open up. To the south lies Satara and Kolhapur, homes once to the royal courts of the Marathas, and some of the most bustling cities in the state today. And if you take the road west, you will enter deeper into Maharashtra, into the regions of Marathwada and Vidarbha.

Today, under the shade of a large canopy in Supe, Rohit Pawar, the rising star in the Pawar family whom Sharad Pawar seemed to have anointed re­cently as a future chief minister, is tearing into the government. Raising multiple issues, from unemployment to social unrest, he de­scribes the current state in Maharashtra as a ‘chakravyuh’ that only his party and alliance partners in the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) can lead the people out of. Pawar has been travelling all day to multiple stops in far-flung and tiny villages, where he delivers speeches often to small gatherings number­ing not more than 50 individuals. At Supe, however, a fairly large gathering of about 250 has gathered, and Pawar, apparently en­thused by the turnout is laying it into the crowd. One can see why Sharad Pawar thinks so highly of him. He has an immediate con­nect with the crowd. He draws them in with jokes and one-liners, answers queries with earnestness and conviction, and as time passes by, more and more individuals from nearby homes come by to listen, finding space where it can be found, on the ground sometimes or on the stumps of chopped trees.

If one can gauge the sentiment of voters from the enthusiasm they exhibit during campaign speeches, going by the applause and cheer, you would expect everyone gathered that day would be voting for Sharad Pawar’s faction of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). But a little distance away from the crowd, a small group of middle-aged women standing under a tree seems less enthused. They are unwilling to share their voter prefer­ences, but prod them a little about the government’s achievements, and each one of them has little hesitation in mentioning the money they have received through the Ladki Bahin Yojana scheme. One of them has used the monthly financial assistance they receive through this scheme to clear up her debts, another to set up a small shop selling vegetables, and yet another to repair her house.

Whether or not this scheme will help the Mahayuti govern­ment tide by the disquiet exhibited in the Lok Sabha election results needs to be seen, here in this distant town in western Maharashtra, in the midst of a rapt audience listening to a spirited speech by an Opposition leader, it is still the first thing on the lips of this small group of women.

Western Maharashtra, often referred to as the state’s sugar belt because of its sugarcane fields and sugar mills, is arguably the most important region politically for the state. It has the highest number of seats in the state Assembly—70—and has thrown up some of the state’s tallest Maratha leaders. The levers of power here tend to run through its vast cooperative sector, from sugar factories, dairy and agriculture produce, cotton mills, and credit societies and banks, something which the undivided NCP and Congress understood well and dominated.

The arrival of Narendra Modi at the Centre however disrupted the political landscape in this region, and during the 2019 Assembly elections, although the then undivided NCP won 27 seats and Con­gress 12, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won as many as 20 seats. The rest went to the then undivided Shiv Sena and some indepen­dent candidates. When Ajit Pawar took much of the NCP leader­ship with him and crossed over into the Mahayuti alliance, it was expected that he would carry all the clout the party held especially in western Maharashtra with him. But Sharad Pawar’s faction ap­peared to have held its own in the Lok Sabha polls earlier this year.

While there might be a larger ideological and emotional battle being fought between various parties, at the ground level, the split in NCP and the eventual seat-sharing arrangement made between allies has presented both opportunities and difficulties for various individuals. Those who had once left their parties to join another, now find the original parties they had broken away from in alli­ance with their current one. None is as pronounced as the case of Harshvardhan Patil, a veteran party switcher and powerful sugar baron in Indapur, which borders the high profile constituency of Baramati. An independent MLA initially, he later formally joined Congress, and then BJP, once NCP reneged on a deal, it is said, where they promised him the In­dapur Assembly seat in 2019 in exchange for his support for Supriya Sule in Bara­mati during the Lok Sabha polls that year. Patil switched to BJP in 2019, only to find his bete noire Ajit joining the Mahayuti alliance, and the Indapur seat going to Ajit’s candidate Dattatrey Bharne in this election. Patil recently jumped ship yet again, and is now contesting the seat on the ticket of the Sharad Pawar faction.

A similar story has unfolded in Vadga­on Sheri on the outskirts of Pune, where Bapusaheb Pathare, a former NCP mem­ber who quit the party for BJP, has now returned to the Sharad Pawar faction after the Mahayuti assigned the seat to the Ajit faction.

It is now close to afternoon today, when Pathare appears several hours late in a jeep overcrowded with supporters. This is to be a padyatra (campaign trail on foot), but Pathare, visibly exhausted under the harsh sun, appears unwilling to leave his vehicle. It is only after much coaxing, when a large burly man appears that Pathare agrees to leave the vehicle and be carried over the man’s shoulders.

Ask him a question, and he looks to his supporters for answers.

What is the biggest issue in his constituency?
“Traffic,” says one aide.
“Water,” goes another.
“Sewage,” says yet another.

It is only when someone mutters corruption, that all of them begin nodding apparent consensus.

Why did he leave BJP?

Pathare looks perplexed at the question. He had just stopped for some rest at a house, and one of his aides then offers him a note with an answer scribbled on to it. But Pathare falls into an even more pained silence as he scrutinises this note, as though he were a student who had just been handed a tough examination paper.

“Why ask all that,” one aide says. “He has come back. Ghar wapsi ho gaya. Bas. (He has returned home. That’s enough).”

And then Pathare gets dragged away from the house by another bunch.

Much of the contest in western Maharashtra this time is be­tween the two factions of NCP, both with their backs to the walls, as they try to reclaim influence or consolidate their power in this egion. Nowhere is the contest between these two as sharp—and as personal—as it is in Baramati. Just months after the contest between the two sisters-in-law Supriya Sule and Sunetra Pawar, which resulted in the former’s victory, a grudge match is now shaping up, this time between an uncle, the 65-year-old Ajit Pawar who has never lost an election and his political greenhorn nephew YugendraPawar, just33yearsoldbutwhocomeswiththeconsiderable backing of Sharad Pawar.

When Sunetra Pawar contested against Supriya Sule, the latter’s camp built a successful campaign against how the Ajit faction was breaking the family by putting up a family member against her. This is a trick that the Ajit camp now seems to have borrowed as it tries to frame the contest between uncle and nephew

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“The Lok Sabha election in Bara­mati was different,” says Raghvendra Shinde, the Ajit faction’s Baramati party president. “It was a matter of the heart. A father was asking the people to vote for his daughter.”

Shinde is a middle-aged man with a stout body. He appears at the end of the day at his office, having spent the day overseeing campaigns and voter reach programmes across the constitu­ency. “We are leaving nothing to chance this time,” he says. “We aren’t taking Yugendra lightly. He is a Pawar after all. But Ajit dada is Ajit dada. Nobody can beat him here,” he goes on.

This would seem to be the case. Ever since Sharad Pawar vacated this seat so he could enter the Lok Sabha through the Baramati parliamentary constituency in 1991, Ajit has won from here seven times straight. In the last election, the margin separating him and the next-best candidate was a mas­sive 1.65 lakh votes.

Could a political greenhorn do the seemingly unthinkable?

Yugendra Pawar, the latest Pawar to enter politics, appears at the reception area, built around a tastefully done-up courtyard, in his house Anantara, one early morning. “It’s been weeks of just two or three hours of sleep every night,” he says, with more than an air of exhaustion.

To meet him, one must show up at his house in the morning, where you cross two different gates, write your name and purpose of visit into a slip, then bide your time in a waiting space, which is really a large gazebo built in vast garden near a pool of cackling geese, then get handed over by one man with a walkie talkie to another one, then walk up an avenue lined by trees, until you are shown to the reception area built around the courtyard. On November 13, many individuals gather to meet him, and he sits down with every one of them, listening to their pleas and even granting them their requests for selfies, before he hops on to a vehicle to meet his campaign schedule for the day.

Until a few years ago, politics appeared to be a very remote port of call for Yugendra. Spending his adolescence in Mumbai, where he studied at the Cathedral and John Connon School, Yugendra moved to Europe and then to the US to complete his education, before re­turning to India in 2014 and founded a delivery-based startup called ZipTown, where people could use riders to send things across a city.

“It was a Dunzo before Dunzo,” he says, referring to the startup which provides a similar function.

Having watched videos by entrepreneurs which say it is essen­tial for founders to speak with end-users, the young Pawar would personally get on calls with irate customers, who would insist on not paying the nominal fees charged for deliveries. “I would be fighting with people who would refuse to pay the `5 or `10 charg­es because the rider showed up late,” he says. Sharad Pawar, when he learnt about the startup, was both amused and supportive, he says, pointing out how the senior Pawar likes someone trying out something enterprising. “But after some time, he told me to get going, and do some serious work. Unless I could monopolise it and seriously scale it up, he said, there was no point.”

After Sharad Pawar vacated the Baramati assembly seat for the Baramati parliamentary constituency in 1991, Ajit Pawar won from here seven times straight. In the last election, he won by a massive margin of 1.65 lakh votes

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Yugendra tried a few more businesses, including starting an institution for organic and residue-free farming, and became more involved in the sugar factory the family owns. He began spend­ing time in Baramati, and when the split in the party happened, he, along with his family, sided with Sharad Pawar. “My parents initially were talking to my uncle [Ajit], trying to get him to come around, but I was with my grandfather [Sharad Pawar] right from the start. They took away everything, from the party symbol to the flag. We could not leave him at this moment in his life,” he says.

During the Lok Sabha election, when Sunetra Pawar con­tested against Supriya Sule, the latter’s camp built a successful emotional campaign against how the Ajit faction, goaded on by BJP, was breaking the family by putting up a family mem­ber against her. This is a trick that the Ajit camp now seems to have borrowed as it tries to frame the contest between uncle and nephew as one devised by the Sharad Pawar faction to break Ajit’s family. “Yeh bahut galat kaam kiya hai. Nahin karna chahiye tha (This is a very wrong step. It should not have been done,” says Shinde, referring to the nomination of Yugendra, the son of Ajit’s younger brother Shrinivas against him. Ajit has himself referred to this on more than one occasion. Just a few days before, not far from Yugendra’s house, Ajit appeared visibly moved during a campaign rally as he spoke out about the ‘wrong’ being committed by pitting his relative against him. “It is not right, the way this has all played out. The elders should have intervened,” he said. “Who asked that side to fill the form? Has saheb broken our house?”

Yugendra denies this, pointing out how it was Ajit who had split the party, with BJP pulling the strings behind it all.

We are traveling now in his car, moving from one stop to the other, many of them just tiny villages, where he will address a small group of individuals who will squat on the sides of a street.

Baramati has seen development, but it is concentrated in just a tiny part of the constituency, he says. The rest of the constituency still suffers from a host of issues. “I think my constituency, and the rest of the state is intent on making a change,” he says. How much truth there is to this statement will become clear very soon.

About The Author

Lhendup G Bhutia

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