Mumbai: On Tuesday, Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar shared a reel on Instagram of him walking across a field with his arm around a farmer, in deep discussion, inspecting a well, and giving some instructions to the people with him. The reel then shows him talking to a woman, asking her, “Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana koni aanli?” (Who brought the ‘Majhi Ladki Bahin’ scheme?)
With a straight face, the woman promptly answers, “Tumhich (You, who else!)” Pawar breaks into a spontaneous laugh while the woman dabs her eyes with her ‘pallu’ and touches his feet. And with that, and many more such instances, Ajit Pawar attempts to play up the one title that has always been associated with the Baramati MLA — ‘dada (older brother).
The scheme, Majhi Ladki Bahin (My Beloved Sister), announced in the Maharashtra budget in July, involves handing out Rs 1,500 a month to eligible women in the age group of 21 to 65 years with a family income of less than Rs 2.5 lakh.
Elsewhere, Maharashtra CM Eknath Shinde is promoting the same scheme, but with a prefix — the ‘Mukhya Mantri Ladki Bahin Yojana.’ In Shinde’s version of the scheme’s publicity material, he is the brother who will be giving a ‘Raksha Bandhan’ gift to his sisters.
The jostling over who is the brother and the credit war over the scheme is just the tip of the iceberg. There has been a silent power tussle brewing between the deputy CM, in charge of finance, and CM Shinde, as Pawar tries to consolidate his position as a popular, efficient, senior leader with chief ministerial ambitions ahead of the assembly polls this year.
Ajit Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) is in an alliance with the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party (NCP) as the ‘Mahayuti.’
“If Mahayuti wins the election, the most likely scenario will be that the BJP will have the most seats. Eknath Shinde will optimise the urban constituencies, the Mumbai-Thane belt. Meanwhile, Ajit Pawar’s real sphere of influence, which was Pune, Solapur, Ahmednagar mostly failed him in the Lok Sabha elections. He is not able to create new pockets of influence. So, in all probability, with regards to his chief ministerial ambitions, it will be a waiting game for another five years,” Nitin Birmal, associate professor at Pune’s Dr. Ambedkar College of Arts & Commerce, told ThePrint.
He added, if the rival Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) wins, then it will be a definite waiting game. The MVA comprises the Congress, the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), and the NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar).
“So, Ajit Pawar is posturing now, focusing on building himself up vis-a-vis his counterparts, and keeping all roads open for himself.”
In the Lok Sabha election while the Mahayuti trailed the MVA, Ajit Pawar’s NCP particularly cut the worst figure, first, getting just four of the 48 seats to contest in the seat-sharing arrangement with his allies, and then losing three of them.
The Shinde-led Shiv Sena, on the other hand, pushed and secured 15 seats of which it won seven.
On record, the Ajit Pawar-led NCP has maintained that it took a conscious decision to go with the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), and that there have been no second thoughts. Meanwhile, BJP leaders speak about how votes of ally parties — Shinde-led Shiv Sena and Pawar-led NCP — did not transfer to their candidates, and how it was especially difficult to sell the Pawar-led NCP’s alliance with the BJP, with both parties being traditional rivals.
In this backdrop, there are concerns among Mahayuti leaders that Ajit Pawar might be keeping all channels open for himself.
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Juniors who overtook aspirational CM
Last week, as Pawar shared the stage with CM Shinde and Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis in Shinde’s home turf Thane at a function to release a biography on the chief minister, he said aloud something that has perhaps been bothering him for long, giving it a coat of humour.
“I am from the batch of 1990. The rest are all my juniors. They all have overtaken me, while I stayed where I was,” Pawar said, clarifying in as many words that this is being said in a lighter vein and that “all things happen in their own time.”
Seated on the stage, Shinde looked at Pawar with a slight smile, while Fadnavis buried his head in his phone, but couldn’t resist a smile.
Shinde first became MLA in 2004, while Fadnavis won his first assembly election in 1999. Pawar, on the other hand, first became a Lok Sabha MP from Baramati in 1991, resigning the same year to make way for his uncle, Sharad Pawar, to contest in a bypoll. He won the Baramati assembly election the same year. Pawar has been deputy CM on five occasions so far, but the top post has always eluded him.
“It is obvious for Ajit Pawar to feel that he has been left behind, and for him to show that superiority complex. In 2019, when the MVA government was being formed and Eknath Shinde’s name was proposed as CM, many senior leaders from Congress and NCP said that they will not work under Shinde, and that’s how Uddhav Thackeray came to be CM. Today, Ajit Pawar has to work under Shinde as his CM despite having more seniority,” political commentator Hemant Desai said, adding the Lok Sabha poll results may have further diminished his clout.
Again, masked as a joke, Pawar again made his chief ministerial ambitions known at the programme. “I joked with a few, when you told Eknathrao Shinde that if you come with a certain number of MLAs, we will make you CM, you should have told me, I would have brought the whole party along,” he said, leaving the audience in splits.
Shinde had rebelled against the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena in 2022 with a majority of MLAs, toppling the Thackeray-led MVA government. He then joined hands with the BJP to form a government in the state with himself as CM.
On the Thane stage, Pawar also handed out several back-handed compliments to the CM, on how Shinde took away many leaders who were his protegees, or how he is the first CM seen to be constantly surrounded by people. “Sometimes I get frustrated. I say, ‘Is this a cabinet meeting, or what is exactly happening’,” Pawar said.
Pawar also spoke about how Shinde is the only CM who keeps signing off on things. “I sometimes say, you are going on signing, what is happening, somebody might say something,” he said.
A senior NCP MLA said to be close to Pawar said requesting anonymity, “It has always been Ajit dada’s dream to be CM. It is natural for him to feel left behind. Now, the party that gets the highest seats within the alliance should stake claim on the CM’s post. Eknath Shinde got his wish fulfilled despite not having the maximum MLAs in the alliance. So, now it is dada’s turn and he is simply making his wish known.”
‘Keeping all channels open?’
Enroute his Jan Sanman Yatra, Pawar, while speaking with Marathi television channel ‘Jai Maharashtra’ on Tuesday, regretted his decision of fielding his wife, Sunetra, against his cousin, Supriya Sule, in Baramati this year. Sunetra lost to Sule, the incumbent MP and the candidate from the rival Sharad Pawar-led NCP.
“By saying things like I shouldn’t have fielded Sunetra against sister Supriya, he is also trying to gain sympathy from the Sharad Pawar loyalists,” Birmal said.
At the Ajit Pawar-led NCP’s office in Mumbai, Sunil Tatkare, the party state president, while speaking on the Baramati election, suggested that Pawar was just expressing his sentiment on the experiences that have come his way during elections.
“Dada is the national president. Dada is dada. Dada is great and he will prove it,” Tatkare said. “But one thing is certain, under dada’s leadership, the decision that the NCP took to be part of the NDA was keeping the future in mind and getting work done.”
The Ajit Pawar-led NCP’s allies are not so sure.
A senior MLA from the Shinde-led Shiv Sena said Pawar’s biggest flaw is, perhaps, that he is all about “I, me, myself.”
“Ajit dada is over-ambitious and his image is such that he thinks only he can take strong, bold decisions, only he can get work done. For example, this insistence of calling the scheme ‘Ladki Bahin Yojana’, dropping the word ‘Mukhya Mantri’, and trying to show that he as finance minister is bringing this scheme to people,” the leader said.
NCP leaders shrug their shoulders and say they are simply using the scheme’s official name in government records.
Another leader from the Shinde-led Shiv Sena said, while Pawar is admitting now that fielding his wife against his cousin was a mistake, nobody would have dared to give him this advice before the Lok Sabha polls. “It is this nature that makes him unpredictable and makes us wonder if he is keeping channels open for later,” he added.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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