“The result is absolutely unacceptable. This is not the mandate of the people of Maharashtra. Our leaders had extensively travelled across Maharashtra, and we knew what the pulse was. We will introspect once the results are clearer and take remedial measures,” party spokesperson Mahesh Tapase told ThePrint.
The MVA, which comprises the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), the Congress and the NCP (Sharad Pawar), won just 46 seats.
The MVA’s debilitating loss, and within that the Sharad Pawar-led NCP’s poor performance, raises more strongly than ever the one question always associated with Sharad Pawar’s NCP: What is the party’s future, especially after Sharad Pawar, who has carried the party on his shoulders until now, considering he is at a ripe age of 83 years?
In the run up to the assembly polls, Pawar had hinted at resigning from active politics after his current Rajya Sabha term ends in 2026—a statement that he has made in the past, too, and still continued his political life with just as much zest.
“Immediately, it will be difficult for the Sharad Pawar-led NCP to keep its flock together, like for the Shiv Sena (UBT). Many of their leaders may shift to the Ajit Pawar-led NCP and the Shinde-led Shiv Sena. That danger may be less for the Shiv Sena (UBT) because civic polls are yet to be held across Maharashtra, especially in Mumbai, but the Sharad Pawar-led NCP may see that drain,” Abhay Deshpande, a political commentator, told ThePrint.
Party sources say some within the party have been speaking about merging with the Congress. However, Deshpande doesn’t see it as an immediate possibility, especially given that the Congress has not been able to continue its momentum from the Lok Sabha elections.
The Congress won just 16 seats in Maharashtra, as against the 44 seats it had won in 2019. This would be the party’s worst-ever assembly tally in Maharashtra.
Deshpande said, “In the longer run, Sharad Pawar has indicated his succession plan without spelling it out as such. That plan is to have Supriya Sule as the party’s overall in-charge and its face at the national level, and the next-generation Pawars to take Ajit Pawar’s place at the state level.”
The NCP underwent a split in July 2023, when Ajit Pawar walked out with a majority of its MLAs, claiming to be the real NCP and also subsequently winning that tag from the Election Commission of India (ECI). Ajit Pawar immediately joined the government of the Shinde-led Shiv Sena and the BJP.
What’s next for Sharad Pawar?
The year 2019 saw the launch of two new Pawars, both grand-nephews of Sharad Pawar—one whom the NCP supremo brought in unwillingly and the other whom he backed wholeheartedly. The first was Ajit Pawar’s son, Parth Pawar, who contested the Lok Sabha elections and became the first member of the Pawar family to lose an election. The second was Rohit Pawar, who became an MLA from Karjat Jamkhed in the Ahmednagar constituency.
This year, Sharad Pawar eased one member of the Pawar family into politics, his grand-nephew Yugendra Pawar.
It is this next generation of leaders—Rohit and Yugendra—on whom Sharad Pawar could be pinning his hopes to hold fort in the state, while Sule manages the party at a more national level, replicating the old Ajit Pawar-Sule arrangement.
Since the NCP was formed in 1999, Ajit Pawar led the party from the front in Maharashtra, being a troubleshooter for all its MLAs in the state, while Sharad Pawar was the larger face of the NCP, concentrating on growing the party nationally. Following Sharad Pawar’s daughter Supriya Sule’s launch in politics in 2006, when she entered the Rajya Sabha first, the arrangement gradually changed to Ajit Pawar looking after the party’s affairs in Maharashtra while Sule grew its national footprint.
Ajit Pawar’s disgruntlement with the Sharad Pawar-led NCP was due to the fact that uncle Pawar did not formally hand over the mandate of running the NCP to nephew Ajit. At the party’s foundation day last year, a month before the NCP split, Sharad Pawar appointed Supriya Sule as one of the two working presidents of the NCP, giving her the responsibility for driving the party in Maharashtra. There was no mention of Ajit Pawar’s name. A month later, the NCP underwent its worst rebellion.
Political analyst Pratap Asbe said the Sharad Pawar-led NCP is facing a major existential question now, and there aren’t too many options before Sharad Pawar. “But, he is not one to leave the pitch. It is not in his nature to do so,” Asbe said.
He, however, added, “Sharad Pawar has created a next generation of leadership, but leaders like Rohit and Yugendra Pawar will have to struggle by themselves, make their mark, and build the party in the state. They will benefit from Sharad Pawar’s name and goodwill, but they cannot piggyback on his political and campaigning skills alone.”
What makes the pitch more difficult for the Sharad Pawar-led NCP is that his two trusted grand-nephews haven’t come out of this election with flying colours either. Debutant Yugendra, son of Ajit Pawar’s brother Shrinivas Pawar, lost to Ajit Pawar, the incumbent MLA, in the family bastion of Baramati by a wide margin.
Rohit Pawar retained his Karjat Jamkhed constituency but with a much slimmer margin of 1,243 votes. In 2019, he had secured the seat with a margin of 43,347 votes.
Political analyst Deshpande said that had the MVA won and come to power, Sharad Pawar might have considered bringing Sule into state politics.
An NCP leader who did not want to be named said Sule, popularly known as ‘Supriya tai’ in the party, is already heavily involved in the party’s functioning in Maharashtra. “More than she lets on,” he said.
Ajit Pawar’s sprawl
Just as the Sharad Pawar-led NCP was seen as the strongest party coming out of the Lok Sabha elections, the Ajit Pawar-led NCP was nearly written off after the polls. It contested four seats and clinched just one.
However, in the state elections, the Ajit Pawar-led NCP has emerged as one of the biggest winners in terms of vote share, while the vote share of the other two Mahayuti partners remained mostly flat.
In the Lok Sabha election, the BJP secured 26.18 percent of all votes polled, while the Shinde-led Shiv Sena got 12.95 percent.
In the Maharashtra assembly elections this year, the BJP had a 26.77 percent vote share, and the Shinde-led Sena a 12.38 percent share.
In terms of sheer numbers, the MVA’s loss seems to have mostly been the Ajit Pawar-led NCP’s gain. In the Lok Sabha elections, the MVA polled 43.91 percent of all votes, while in the assembly polls, this slipped to 33.45 percent.
The Ajit Pawar-led NCP’s vote share, on the other hand, swelled to 9.01 percent in the assembly polls, when it contested 54 of Maharashtra’s 288 seats, from 3.6 percent in the Lok Sabha elections, when it had contested four of Maharashtra’s 48 parliamentary seats.
Though the Sharad Pawar-led NCP posted a dismal performance, its vote share stayed almost flat between the Lok Sabha election and now. It was 10.27 percent then and is 11.28 percent now, mainly because the party contested in 86 assembly constituencies, while in the Lok Sabha elections, it had fought in 10 parliamentary seats.
“This election, Ajit Pawar has given a sharp answer to all the critics who questioned after the Lok Sabha election why the Mahayuti had brought him on board in the first place,” Nitin Birmal, associate professor at Pune’s Dr. Ambedkar College of Arts & Commerce, told ThePrint.
The verdict vindicates Ajit Pawar’s stance that, within the NCP, his leadership was always paramount in the state.
“The results clearly indicate that Ajit Pawar’s leadership is accepted in the state. The people of Baramati have also chosen Ajit Pawar over Sharad Pawar this time,” Asbe said. “All this has surely come as a huge relief for Ajit Pawar.”
(Edited by Radifah Kabir)
Also Read: BJP is winning elections without Modi. Congress needs to change its strategy
