Will the Alliance Between the NCP Factions Lead to A Merger?

With the much-delayed corporation elections in Maharashtra barely a few weeks away, the season to jump from one party to another has begun. A few leaders, expecting better prospects with rival parties, have already switched allegiances, and many more will be following suit shortly, especially once seat sharing plans are revealed. And yet even in this season of electoral hop, skip and jumps, something unusual stood out. Late last week, Prashant Jagtap, a fairly prominent leader of the Sharad Pawar faction of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP-SP) in Pune, who had served as a mayor of the city once and currently headed the party’s Pune unit, switched to the party’s Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) ally Congress.

Jagtap did not clearly spell out his reasons. He didn’t need to. For over a week now, the word on the streets of Pune and Baramati has been that NCP’s two factions are exploring a rapprochement. It depends on who you speak to but the nature of this tie-up ranges from a temporary alliance for the municipal corporation elections of Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad, to a full-blown merging of the two parties. There have been hints and denials, ‘leaks’ about secret meetings and clarifications at the end of the day, all through the last week and stretching into this one. But it now appears that the two parties are quite close to sealing the deal. If Jagtap’s switch showed how close they were to achieving it, on 28 December,

Ajit Pawar more or less confirmed it. Addressing a campaign rally in Talawade, not far from Pune, Pawar said, “In Pimpri Chinchwad, NCP, the party with the clock symbol, and NCP, the party with the trumpet symbol, will contest the civic election in an alliance.” And in what sounded like a throwback to Raj Thackeray’s speech last week, where the once disgruntled cousin explained his alliance with Uddhav Thackeray’s faction of Shiv Sena as one “Maharashtra has been waiting for a long time”, Ajit Pawar described the coming together of the two NCP factions as “a <parivar> [family]… coming together as many people wanted this to happen.”

If the two do come together, as it now seems it will – whether only temporarily for a couple of municipal corporations or a full-scale merger – it will be the result of more than just the emotional tugs of family bonds. According to reports, it appears that the BJP will be allying with Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena, but not with Ajit Pawar’s NCP in elections to the corporations here and elsewhere. In the opposite camp, the coming together of the Thackerays has unsettled the MVA. The MVA alliance’s poor performances in the state elections and the recent elections to municipal councils and nagar panchayats has also dealt NCP (SP) and the others a heavy blow.

According to one set of rumours, the meetings over an alliance between the two NCP factions had broken down over Ajit Pawar’s insistence that NCP (SP)’s candidates contest under his party’s symbol of the ‘clock’. But this now seems to have been resolved with Ajit Pawar openly saying that  ‘the party with the trumpet symbol’, NCP (SP)’s symbol, will contest the civic election along with his in an alliance. The other member of the Pawar family who has so far admitted an alliance has been reached is the NCP (SP) leader Rohit Pawar. He told reporters that the decision to ally with the rival faction was decided upon keeping the sentiments of local party workers in mind, and that it would be limited to just these two civic bodies.

Even if this were to be a temporary arrangement, what will the coming together of these two mean in the larger scheme of Maharashtra’s politics? At a time when the contours of the state’s political arrangements seem to be reshaping once again, with the coming together of old embittered cousins and an ascendant BJP eating into the traditional vote-banks of many others, could these two factions – members of one ‘parivar’, in Ajit Pawar’s words – be heading together to a reunion too? It might be worth keeping in mind that NCP (SP) chief Sharad Pawar’s Rajya Sabha tenure will end next year in April, 2026. Would the 85-year-old announce his retirement from active politics by the end of his tenure, as some suspect, and perhaps even look at resolving the issue of the two factions?

It is hard to take anyone’s word for anything, especially when it comes to the Pawars who have made political misdirection into an art-form. But at a time when the state’s political landscape is undergoing a major alteration, the first steps towards an NCP reunion seems to be taking place.