The Battle for Baramati

The road that branch­es off from the highway into Popular Nagar Society Road in Pune’s Warje locality is one of the most densely packed urban neighbourhoods in the city. At its narrow­est, no more than two small-sized cars can pass through. The road snakes its way through this locality teeming with shops and tiny temples, old crowded buildings and middle-income housing societies, climbing up a hill sometimes and de­scending sharply, until you make your way out into the highway.

For Supriya Sule and her challenger Sunetra Pawar, this lo­cality of Warje is crucial. Khadakwasla, where Warje falls and which comes under the Baramati constituency, is estimated to have over 5 lakh voters. Unsurprisingly, just about a week before Baramati goes to polls, both Sule and Pawar have focused most of their campaigns in this area.

Today, it is easy to spot Sule walking through this crowded stretch of Popular Nagar Society Road. Dressed in a bright blue sari and walking behind two trucks, one carrying a large model of a man blowing a tutari, the blow horn which is the symbol for her and her father Sharad Pawar’s faction of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), and another shooting confetti in the colours of her party flag, Sule waves enthusiastically at crowds that line up on the roads and balconies of houses, linking up the fingers of her hands to her mouth to make the gesture of a person blowing a tutari, and often telling passersby in Marathi, button duboula, tutari chaula (press the button, play the tutari).

It may be close to midday, with this whole region in Maharashtra in the grip of a severe heatwave, and while many in her contingent slow their pace and take frequent breaks to replenish themselves with water, Sule looks unfetterd. She climbs road dividers to shake hands with people in buses on the other side of the road, poses for selfies with passersby, and takes questions from journalists who struggle to keep pace with her long strides.

What does she feel about competing with a member of her family in this election?

“They couldn’t find a single person anywhere. So, they got someone from my own family to do it,” she says.

A group of elderly women pull Sule into an embrace, and although several minutes pass, she comes back to finish her thought. “It isn’t just about the family or Baramati. The real ob­jective is to finish off my father Sharad Pawar,” she says. “And I won’t let that happen.”

As the election now approaches its third phase, one of the most high-profile constituencies—Baramati in western Maharashtra, featuring Sule and her sister-in-law Sunetra—takes centrestage.

The Baramati constituency has been a Pawar pocket borough ever since a 27-year-old Sharad Pawar first entered the Maha­rashtra state Assembly from this seat in 1967. It has remained with someone from the family ever since, for over two decades right up to 1990 for Pawar, and from then on with his nephew Ajit Pawar. Pawar quit the Assembly seat, so he could enter the Lok Sabha through the Baramati parliamentary seat in 1991, and held on to it till 2009, after which Sule began to represent it. Even during the 2014 and 2019 elections, when the BJP-led alliance swept through various parts of the state, the Pawars won this seat. Sule, and by extension her father, now face what is arguably their biggest challenge in Baramati.

While the principal characters in this election are “tai” (or el-der sister in Marathi, as Sule is often referred to) and “vahini” (or sister-in-law for Sunetra), the fight is really between the uncle and the nephew. Depending on who one speaks to, the answer to who will win remains varied. The retired director of a sugar mill in Baramati who is currently part of the Ajit Pawar-led faction of NCP says choosing between the two was one of the hardest decisions in his life. “Many of us thought it would be a small skir­mish and the two would come back together. Many of us went with Ajit dada because we thought that is going to be the future of the party,” he says. Sitting in the NCP office in Baramati, rifling through sheets of paper that contain the plans for campaigns in the rural areas of the constituency, he admits that this will be a closer fight than many younger members of his party think. “Nobody can discount what saheb [Sharad Pawar] has done for the constituency, and many people, even while they support dada [Ajit Pawar], they are pained to see saheb this way,” he says.

It is a refrain one hears commonly in the streets. Two women in their 60s sit in the compound of their housing society with Sule, holding hands and chatting like old acquaintances, when the latter’s campaign rolls in, but later reveal themselves to be BJP supporters. “Most of us here usually vote for Modi. So, most of us were considering voting for Sunetra,” one of them says. But they cannot help, they say but feel pain for the way the Pawar family has split up.

ON PAPER, AJIT PAWAR appears to hold the aces. Of the six state As­sembly constituencies that are part of Baramati, Ajit and his allies control four. BJP controls Khadakwasla, which contains the highest number of voters, and Daund; and Ajit’s faction controls the Baramati state Assembly seat and Indapur. Pawar’s ally Con­gress controls the other two, Bhor and Puran­dar. Most of the original party and its leaders have also moved with Ajit.

Behind the scenes, however, Pawar has been hard at work smoothening out old rivalries and potential hurdles. He visited the house of his once rival Sambhajirao Kakade recently, the deceased two-term MP from Baramati whose family continues to hold clout, for the first time in many decades; and the house of another old foe, Anantrao Thopate, whose son is the Con­gress MLA from Bhor. Eknath Shinde and Devendra Fadnavis are similarly known to have tried to rein in people Ajit rubbed off the wrong way in the past, like the Shiv Sena leader Vijay Shivtare who had threatened to jump into the fray as an independent candidate.

While much of the original party moved with Ajit, most members of the Pawar clan have aligned themselves with Sharad Pawar and Sule. This includes Ajit’s brother Shrinivas and his immediate family, who are canvassing for Sule. According to them, they would have stayed away, had Ajit not fielded his wife for the constituency.

It is perhaps because of how close the en­tire clan used to be, the two candidates avoid making personal references to one other. Even when they have to complain, they cannot help but allude those complaints to some other individual. When asked how she would rate Sule’s performance as Baramati’s MP, Sunetra’s usual response—often deliv­ered painfully—is to say, “Some people say, it hasn’t been good.” When Sule is asked what she feels about her sister-in-law choosing to contest against her, Sule usually just shrugs her shoulders. Back in March, when they weren’t officially nominated by their par­ties, although rumours about it were doing the rounds, Sule and Sunetra bumped into each other at a temple. They held hands like sisters and their teams broke into smiles. But occasionally, some barbs have gone through. On one occasion, Pawar said voters should choose an “original” Pawar instead of an “out­sider”. When asked about it by a TV channel, Sunetra’s response was to reach for her hand­kerchief and shed a tear.

The two however frame their campaigns differently. While for Sule, this election is an attempt to finish off Pawar, Sunetra frames it as a contest between Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi and avoids any mention of the split in the party. According to Bhimrao Tapkir, the BJP MLA from Khadakwasla, the election of Sunetra will mean more development for the constituency. “Ajit dada is part of the ruling alliance in both the state and the Central government. Electing Sunetra will mean more can be done for the constituency,” he says.

“They [Sule’s campaign team] have been making their whole campaign an emotional one,” says Sunilkumar Musale, a close aide of Ajit Pawar, who is handling Sunetra’s campaign. Another associate of Sunetra, who is helping with the campaign, says Sunetra agreed to contest because of the insistence of members of the Mahayuti alliance [BJP, Ajit-led NCP and Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena alliance in Maharashtra]. Was she hesitant because she would have to contest against her sister-in-law? “Not really hesitant,” the associate says, “It was just that she hadn’t participated in elections before. But then there was such a big demand for her.”

We are moving through Warje and nearby Kothrud, following Sunetra’s campaign trail, not far from where Sule had conducted hers the previous day. Unlike Sule, Sunetra’s campaign has been designed differently. She appears to prefer meeting people in large housing societies and conducting meetings in small corners, per­haps to work around her limitations as an orator and usually travels to places in a convoy of vehicles.

The two are also very different from each other. Sule is an instinc­tive politician. Her campaign managers often look on from afar, as she does her own thing, from climbing road dividers to holding people’s hands, taking selfies with passersby, including pulling a newlywed couple returning from their wedding out of their car to take pictures. At one point in the evening, when her rally finds itself stuck in a traffic jam, she hops on to a passing scooter to get to her next meeting point.

Sunetra, in comparison, gives off the air of a reluctant politi­cian. She speaks in a soft voice at her meets, Musale often hand­ing her little chits of information. As we move through Kothrud, an unbearable heat has built itself. Sunetra is already late in her schedule, but she retires into the bedroom of a loyalist’s house for several hours after lunch. Everyone else, from the loyalist who owns the house to members of her team, and the swelling numbers of people who she is expected to interact with, wait in the living room. When she finally appears, the appointments are postponed yet again. Much of the day passes this way.

It is late evening now outside a large housing complex in Kothrud. A group of women, dressed in colourful saris, gather with gifts and sweets to welcome Sunetra. One of them, a BJP worker, was supposed to welcome Sunetra to her house, but she has just been informed that the delayed schedule can permit only a quick meet-and-greet outside the housing complex.

The evening stretches on, but she does not arrive.

2024 Elections2024: The CountdownAjit PawarBaramatiGeneral election 2024MaharashtraSharad PawarSunetra PawarSupriya Sule