Ajit Pawar Dies In Plane Crash

Ajit Pawar, Maharashtra’s deputy chief minister whose rebellion against his uncle Sharad Pawar in 2023 created a stir in the state’s politics, has died in a plane crash.

The 66 year old was travelling with four other individuals according to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation to Baramati in a chartered flight (Learjet 45, operated by VSR), when the plane crashed during landing at around 8.45 am. The other four, DGCA said, were Pawar’s personal security officer and an attendant, along with the pilot-in-command and first officer. According to initial reports, no one is believed to have survived the crash.

Pawar was travelling to Baramati to address public meetings that had been scheduled there ahead of the upcoming zilla parishad elections. These elections were particularly crucial for Pawar, whose party the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) had failed to win the municipal elections in Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad despite forming an alliance with his uncle Sharad Pawar’s faction of the NCP earlier this month.

Among the leaders who mourned his loss was Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who posted on X, “Shri Ajit Pawar Ji was a leader of the people, having a strong grassroots level connect. He was widely respected as a hardworking personality at the forefront of serving the people of Maharashtra. His understanding of administrative matters and passion for empowering the poor and downtrodden were also noteworthy. His untimely demise is very shocking and saddening. Condolences to his family and countless admirers. Om Shanti.”

Pawar drew his political capital, like the rest of his family, from Western Maharashtra, where power resided in controlling sugar plantations and sugar cooperatives, something Pawar excelled in. He entered Lok Sabha for the first time in 1991 from the Baramati parliamentary constituency, but later gave up that seat when Sharad Pawar wanted to enter the fray from that constituency. Since then, while some member of the Pawar family controlled the parliamentary constituency, Pawar held the assembly constituency, winning it constituency seven times.

When he split the NCP and joined the Mahayuti government, it sent shock-waves throughout the state’s political landscape. In recent times, however he had been giving signals that the two factions might rejoin. After their failure in the municipal polls, Pawar had hinted that the two factions would contest the zilla parishad elections under his party symbol of the clock, reviving talks that that a merger was around the corner.