Mumbai: Ajit Pawar’s sudden unexplained disappearances always make news, such as earlier this month when the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader cut his day’s programme short and was reportedly unreachable.
And there are precedents for why his disappearances are newsy.
In September 2019, about a month before the Maharashtra assembly polls, Pawar emailed his resignation as MLA to the Speaker and went incommunicado.
The resignation and Pawar’s disappearance came after the Enforcement Directorate named him, his uncle and NCP chief Sharad Pawar, and a host of other NCP and Congress leaders in a case related to the alleged Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank scam.
Pawar senior had fended off reporters’ questions, saying his nephew was probably upset at the way the family was being “targeted”.
Then, after the election threw up a hung assembly, when Sharad Pawar was trying to cobble together an alliance of the Congress, the NCP and the undivided Shiv Sena as the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), Ajit Pawar disappeared for the second time, only to reappear alongside the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s Devendra Fadnavis at Raj Bhavan.
Pawar junior’s support, along with the backing of a few NCP MLAs, helped Fadnavis form a government in the state that lasted all of 72 hours.
So, on 7 April, when Pawar was reportedly unreachable after cutting short an event in Pune, there were rumours about the possibility of him deserting the MVA alliance, joining hands with the BJP and yet another political potboiler playing out in Maharashtra.
An irate Pawar later clarified that he was just resting at home, dealing with “acidity” in words almost as acerbic as his ailment. He lashed out at television channels for “defaming him”.
While Pawar may really have been troubled by gut acid reflux, the four-time Maharashtra deputy CM’s various enigmatic moves lay sufficient grounds to believe the worst, say political analysts.
However, they add, the posturing right now is just to prepare the pitch, keep the door slightly open for any eventuality, and meanwhile bargain for more power for himself within his party and the MVA by keeping his allies guessing.
“The nephew is doing exactly what his uncle has been known to do — being with the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), but speaking in favour of the BJP,” Abhay Deshpande, a Mumbai-based political commentator, told ThePrint.
“He (Ajit Pawar) is preparing the pitch for any eventuality, just like his uncle thought it wise to do,” he added.
Even as speculation over Pawar, the MLA from Baramati, possibly leading an Eknath Shinde-style rebellion and joining the BJP is gaining ground, the lack of a strong rebuttal by either Pawar himself or senior NCP leaders has done little to extinguish the flames.
Speaking to reporters last week, the NCP’s Maharashtra chief Jayant Patil shrugged off the rumours as “baseless”, while Sharad Pawar refused to respond to a question about the NCP possibly supporting the BJP.
The NCP’s Baramati MP Supriya Sule, Sharad Pawar’s daughter, told reporters that she doesn’t follow gossip. She, however, added: “It’s sunny right now, but I can’t predict it if will rain in 15 minutes.”
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The cryptic moves of Ajit Pawar
In 2019, within three days of supporting a Fadnavis-led government in Maharashtra, Ajit Pawar had returned to the NCP, welcomed with a warm hug by cousin Sule at the entrance of the state legislature.
However, despite legislative clarity on which side he belongs to, Pawar has kept an air of mystery alive.
“I think Ajit Pawar is constantly bargaining within his party, negotiating for more power, more control. That is the reason behind his mystical moves. But Sharad Pawar doesn’t seem to be paying much attention to it,” Dr Sanjay Patil, a researcher at Mumbai University, told ThePrint.
When he was deputy CM as part of Maharashtra’s MVA government (2019 to 2022), Pawar’s moves such as garlanding a portrait of Hindutva ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar — an icon hailed by the BJP and the undivided Shiv Sena — and tweeting tributes to Bharatiya Jana Sangh ideologue Deendayal Upadhyaya, only to delete them later, had raised eyebrows.
Even after the MVA lost power after Eknath Shinde’s rebellion split the Shiv Sena in June 2022 and Pawar was named leader of the opposition in Maharashtra the following month, the mystique around his political intentions continued.
A senior Congress MLA who did not wish to be named said: “There is a general feeling among all opposition MLAs that Ajit dada is not cornering the (Shiv Sena-BJP) government as aggressively as he should be as opposition leader. He could probably be going easy on the BJP so as not to invite the wrath of central agencies.”
The Enforcement Directorate’s first chargesheet in the alleged Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank money laundering case last week has further strengthened this suspicion, which was echoed by many other opposition MLAs ThePrint spoke to.
The chargesheet did not have Pawar’s name as one of the accused. But Pawar himself told the media that this did not mean he had been given a “clean chit”, and that the probe was still underway.
The ED has alleged irregularities in loan disbursements by the bank to cooperative sugar factories, saying that the loans were sanctioned despite the factories having weak financials, in many cases without any collateral. The factories were then shown to be sick and allegedly sold to close relatives of certain politicians.
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Modi’s degree issue, EVMs
An NCP functionary, requesting anonymity, said many within the party, too, do not understand why Ajit Pawar does or says certain things that create controversy.
One such instance was when the former deputy CM had walked out of the NCP’s national convention in September last year without delivering a speech despite his supporters raising slogans in his favour.
By the time he returned, Sharad Pawar had started his concluding remarks. The incident sparked a buzz about a possible internal tussle within the NCP, considering that Ajit Pawar’s political ambitions have often caused friction between him and Sharad Pawar, and clashes with his daughter Sule.
Ajit Pawar later clarified that his “walkout” was actually for a “washroom break” and that not too much should be read into it as he never speaks at national conventions anyway.
In the last week, Pawar’s alleged fickleness and the possibility of tying up with the BJP have once again dominated Maharashtra’s political landscape.
Speaking about the controversy over Sharad Pawar not being in favour of a joint parliamentary committee probe into US-based shortseller Hindenburg Research’s allegations against the Adani Group, the Baramati MLA had told the media that Sharad Pawar’s was the last word within the party.
However, at the same time, Ajit Pawar spoke about electronic voting machines (EVMs) being trustworthy despite Sharad Pawar having called opposition parties last month to discuss the machines allegedly being tampered with during elections.
Ajit Pawar’s dismissal of the controversy around Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s allegedly fake university degree — despite Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) chief Uddhav Thackeray having raised the issue at the MVA’s joint rally at Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar earlier this month — also raised some eyebrows. As did his praise for Modi when he attributed the BJP’s success to “Modi’s magic.”
Speaking to ThePrint, an NCP MLA who is a loyalist of Ajit Pawar slammed the talk of Pawar joining the BJP as “media created”.
“Everyone feels that the Supreme Court’s decision on the disqualification petitions against Shiv Sena MLAs will not be kept pending for too long, and there are possibilities of the decision going against this government,” the MLA said.
The leader was referring to the disqualification petitions that the Shiv Sena (UBT) and the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena have filed against each others’ MLAs after Shinde’s rebellion against the Thackeray-led party last year.
“Many leaders are making statements that might help them turn a political vacuum into an opportunity. This is no different. But Ajit dada is a frank person, and the few of us close to him have not had any whiff of plans to join hands with the BJP,” he added.
Like uncle, like nephew
The many rumours that have been flying as political watchers try to decode Ajit Pawar’s moves often sound like a script that has already played out. But, in the context of a different Pawar — NCP chief Sharad.
Ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha election, and for months after the poll, it seemed as though Sharad Pawar was cozying up to the BJP despite being part of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA).
Eventually, before the Maharashtra assembly poll that year, the NCP broke its 15-year-old alliance with the Congress and contested the state election solo. And after the election, it offered the BJP outside support to form a government in the state.
That permutation, however, did not materialise and the NCP sat with the Congress on the opposition benches. But Pawar kept up his overtures to Modi and vice versa, praising the PM’s commitment to the country. The latter, in turn, described the octogenarian as a leader with a repository of experience who had handheld him during his early days in politics.
“In a way, Ajit Pawar’s actions are similar to Sharad Pawar’s, but there is still a stark difference between the two leaders,” Hemant Desai, political commentator, told ThePrint.
“Sharad Pawar is very strong on his ideology and as such will not have a direct alliance with the BJP considering the way it is aggressively espousing a Hindutva ideology. Ajit Pawar, meanwhile, is a more practical politician,” he said, adding: “It is true that it is difficult to predict Ajit Pawar’s next move. If he really wanted to nip the rumours in the bud, he could have held a press conference and cleared the air.”
All that Ajit Pawar has said on the issue so far is a sardonic response to reporters’ questions over a tweet by activist Anjali Damania, who said she had heard that “15 MLAs would be disqualified and Ajit Pawar is going to go with the BJP”.
Pawar simply said: “What will a small party worker like me say about such a big personality?”, referring to Damania.
But, Desai thinks, there’s more to the story than the grapevine says.
“Everybody talks about Ajit Pawar’s place in the NCP in a post-Sharad Pawar era. But being a practical politician, he knows that it is not just that, but also about the political scope for the NCP in a world without the party’s supremo,” Desai said. “It is this scenario that Ajit Pawar is preparing for,” he added.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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