The Shiv Sena (UBT) is an ally of the NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar) as part of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) along with Congress. Devkate has been helping Yugendra in his campaign.
For the second time this year after the general elections, Baramati, a bastion of the Pawar family in Maharashtra’s politics, is seeing a direct contest between two members of the family. On one side is Ajit, known for his blunt, straight talk, bordering arrogance. On the other side is nephew Yugendra, who wants to build a political persona that’s exactly the opposite—polite and humble.
This one is a David vs Goliath fight. There’s 65-year-old Ajit Pawar, a seasoned politician who has never lost an election, seeking his eighth term. On the other side is 33-year-old Yugendra, who never thought he would enter politics, let alone contest an election.
“It is not something that I had thought of even in my wildest imagination that I will be contesting this election, that too against the incumbent MLA. But, I also never thought that what happened in my family, or the split in the party, would ever happen,” Yugendra told ThePrint on Friday.
In June 2023, Ajit Pawar rebelled against uncle Sharad Pawar to join hands with the ruling Mahayuti comprising the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). With Sharad Pawar naming his daughter Supriya Sule as the party’s working president, putting her in charge of Maharashtra, it was clear that he had overlooked the nephew in his succession plan.
In his very first speech after the split, Ajit Pawar had asked if it was his fault that he was born in a different womb. The split in the party has also created a chasm within the Pawar family.
At a rally Monday at Kanheri village, the Maharashtra deputy chief minister was tearing up as he spoke about how his mother had urged Sharad Pawar not to field a candidate against him.
“The way all of this is playing out, it is not right. The elders should have spoken. Who asked that side to fill the form? Saheb did. So did Saheb break our house?” Ajit Pawar said, pausing to have a sip of water and regain composure. “The state of politics today has become very poor. A household that stays together for generations didn’t take much time to break.”
This is the second nephew versus uncle tussle within the Pawar family, with Sharad and Ajit Pawar also at loggerheads following the latter’s rebellion. Yugendra is son of Ajit Pawar’s elder brother Shrinivas and his wife Sharmila.
The battle lines are clearly drawn. The Ajit Pawar-led NCP is campaigning on its most prominent selling point—’Ajit dada’ and the development he has brought in Baramati over the three decades through which he has represented the constituency.
On the other side, Yugendra’s quest is to return Baramati to its “original custodian”, his grandfather Sharad Pawar. He says, most of the development in Baramati was brought by senior Pawar and Ajit Pawar was able to build on it only to a certain extent.
“I am not looking at who is in front of me. I am looking at who is behind me,” Yugendra told reporters Sunday as he filed his nomination form for the Maharashtra assembly poll on 20 November.
Nephew vs uncle
As he travelled from Khatalpatta village to the nearby Mekhali village, Yugendra recalled how this is the fourth time this year that he is travelling through the entire constituency—every village, every road—as part of a journey he had never imagined for himself.
Yugendra started hitting the ground from a political point of view in January. The Lok Sabha elections were on the cards, and the Ajit Pawar-led NCP seemed to be preparing for the Deputy CM’s wife, Sunetra, to contest against her sister-in-law Sule.
As the tumult within the party was about to spill over into the family, Yugendra was among the first from the non-political members to pick a side. His parents followed suit.
Sunetra Pawar eventually lost to the incumbent Sule. She was later elected to the Rajya Sabha in June. Since then, Ajit Pawar has often spoken about how he regretted his decision to pit his wife against his cousin, something that he repeated at the Kanheri rally as well. By that time, there was talk within the political circles about Sharad Pawar considering his grandnephew to take on Ajit Pawar in the Maharashtra polls.
“It is emotionally difficult, of course, it is, it will be,” Yugendra told ThePrint on how taking on his uncle, deepening the fissures within the family, is tough. “But, it is also difficult to see Pawar Saheb isolated. What they tried to do to him by taking away all the legislators, the symbol, the party. And even if it is emotionally difficult, I feel like I am doing the right thing. I have stayed with the truth. I have stayed with my grandfather.”
Earlier, his association with the family bastion was largely through his social work through his family’s Sharayu Foundation. He has been involved in the running of his family’s businesses under the umbrella of the Sharayu Group of Companies.
At Kanheri, Ajit Pawar said, he respected people’s mandate for the Baramati Lok Sabha election, but reminded his electorate of the arguments that were echoing along the roads and villages of Baramati during the campaign for the general elections—’Tai (Sule) for Lok Sabha, Dada (Ajit Pawar) for Vidhan Sabha.’
The Baramati constituency in western Maharashtra’s Pune district has been with the Pawar family since 1967. Sharad Pawar represented it from 1967 to 1990 before handing over the mantle to his nephew, Ajit Pawar, who has been representing the constituency ever since.
The five-time deputy CM started his career as a Lok Sabha MP in 1991 only to step aside for uncle Sharad Pawar to contest the election in a by-poll. He contested and won the Baramati Assembly polls the same year. Sharad Pawar went on to represent Baramati in Parliament till 2009 after which his daughter took over.
Sanjay Bhosale, a farmer from Jogwadi village, told ThePrint that by and large, the trend that people showed during the Lok Sabha elections is likely to continue in the assembly election. “Dada has done a lot of work, undoubtedly. But, defeating Saheb (Sharad Pawar) in Baramati is still unthinkable for many people here.”
A day after Ajit Pawar’s rally, Sharad Pawar and Supriya Sule were campaigning at Kanheri for Yugendra on Tuesday, addressing another massive rally.
Bhosale said, “Yesterday, three buses went from our village to Kanheri for Ajit Dada’s sabha. Today, six buses have gone for Saheb’s sabha.”
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Development under Sharad vs Ajit Pawar
As part of his campaign, Yugendra is reminding the people of the work that Sharad Pawar did in Baramati, building its base.
“When Pawar Saheb was the MLA in Baramati, life became better and income started increasing of the people, or the common man,” he said, adding that his grandfather brought industrial development corporations to Baramati, helped the dairy and poultry industry grow to supplement the income of farmers, helped bring cash crops such as sugarcane to the region, brought ace companies such as Bharat Forge, Schreiber Dynamix Dairies, Diego, Vespa, Ferrero Rocher and so on.
With this strong a base, Yugendra says, his uncle did not build as much as he could have. “The work has mainly happened in the urban areas, specific roads, corners of the city, and some buildings have been made well. But, when we are talking about sustainable development, we can’t see that in rural areas. The work that Pawar Saheb did in the past should have been taken forward, but it was not.”
He talks of what is colloquially known as the ‘Malida gang’ in Baramati—a cartel of contractors who keep getting work orders in the constituency. “Even today, there is water scarcity in many villages. Despite it having rained well, there is no water to drink. There is unemployment.”
At his Kanheri rally, Ajit Pawar slapped his hand on his forehead uttering the words, ‘Malida gang,’ as if in frustration.
He said, every MLA gets Rs 5 crore a year as development funds, but as a finance minister, he allocated Rs 9,000 crore worth of funds over the years to Baramati.
“If works worth Rs 9,000 crore are being executed, it is natural that the companies here will keep getting contracts. If I had brought outsiders to do these works, then I would have been criticised for something else,” he said.
“If we look at the Baramati 30-35 years ago (roughly when he over as Baramati MLA), and the Baramati now, a karyakarta (worker) like me feels proud when I travel on its every road, not just in Baramati but in every part of the taluka.”
The sitting MLA accepted that unemployment among the youth is a problem. “I feel bad that we brought so many industries to Baramati, but many youngsters here still don’t have jobs. I will ensure that the youth of Baramati get jobs in the industries in Baramati on priority.”
साद घातली मी, भरघोस प्रतिसाद दिला तुम्ही.. तुमचे आशीर्वाद लाभले, पुन्हा प्रेम सिद्ध झाले.. आपल्यातील घट्ट नात्याचा धागा असाच आणखीन मजबूत होत जावो..!#दादांची_बारामती pic.twitter.com/DHFBpW3LfA
— Ajit Pawar (@AjitPawarSpeaks) October 28, 2024
His NCP also admits that the water supply is inadequate, but steps are being taken to address it. Their door-to-door campaign, during the Lok Sabha, as well as now, involves a good amount of emphasis on all the water-related schemes that have been sanctioned for the Baramati taluka and are underway.
With Ajit Pawar busy campaigning across Maharashtra, his campaign in Baramati is being overseen mainly by his wife, Sunetra, and his sons, Parth and Jay.
On Monday, Parth told reporters that the sympathy factor that the rival Sharad Pawar-led NCP got during the Lok Sabha election will not continue in the assembly poll.
“Unfortunately, we don’t run a negative campaign (against rivals). We focus on pure politics, and so the message that has gone amid the public that there is a wave in their favour, there is nothing like that. Everyone is with us. It is just that we don’t advertise,” Parth said.
‘A vote for Dada is a vote for BJP’
In the last two decades, the BJP has aggressively expanded across Maharashtra, but there are a handful of regions where it has not been able to make a foray. The most formidable of them is Baramati.
In the 2014 general elections, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) gave a tough fight in Baramati with Mahadev Jankar, chief of Rashtriya Samaj Paksha (RSP), an NDA ally, losing to Supriya Sule by a margin of nearly 70,000 votes, the lowest victory margin for the Pawar family in Baramati. That’s been the closest that the BJP has been able.
In the assembly polls that year, the BJP trailed Ajit Pawar of the undivided NCP by 89,791 votes. In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, BJP lost by 1.5 lakh votes, while in the state polls, Ajit Pawar trounced the BJP by 1.65 lakh votes.
In 2022, when the BJP drew up a list of 144 constituencies where it needs to strengthen itself, Baramati was one of them and Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman was given the task of ramping up the party’s base here.
The next year, the BJP found a shorter route to clinch Baramati when Ajit Pawar rebelled against his uncle and aligned his party with the BJP. In the Lok Sabha election, as well as now, the rallies of the Ajit Pawar-led NCP have a heavy dose of saffron and lotus flags.
“My family or the people of Baramati have never supported the BJP, or the thinking of the BJP, or the ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (the BJP’s ideological parent). We have always been progressive thinkers with a secular ideology. We have believed in the work of Shiv Shahu Phule Ambedkar, Ahilyadevi Holkar. We are taking their thoughts and ideas and going forward,” Yugendra said. “A vote for them (Ajit Pawar-led NCP) is as good as voting for the BJP.”
Ajit Pawar countered insisting that he joined the Mahayuti only to be able to deliver more to his constituents by working within the ruling dispensation.
“The thought that you got me elected the last time with a historic margin was weighing on me. I had decided when I get the chance to be in the state government, on the back of your blessings, we will work so much that even people of Baramati will feel proud of the work,” he said.
He added, he joined the government run by Eknath Shinde and Devendra Fadnavis but never wavered on his ideology. “Some people try to defame us. But, we don’t want to waste five years after getting elected.”
Meanwhile, Ajit Pawar is also trying to bust his rival’s positioning of himself as polite and accessible, and the uncle as arrogant and inaccessible.
At the Kanheri rally, when a NCP worker cross questioned Ajit Pawar while he was speaking on a statistic, he simply paused, took a moment to think and asserted that the figure was right. “Look how much your Dada has changed,” the Baramati MLA said, chuckling. “The old Dada would have shouted at the party worker ‘chup re’ (shut up).” (EOM)
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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