Ajit Pawar’s Two-Handed Game

Maharashtra’s most agile politician finds that even political acrobatics have a breaking point

NCP (Sharad Pawar) State President Shashikant Shinde and party MLA Rohit Pawar during a rally in Navi Mumbai on Sunday. | Pic: PTI

Pune: In Maharashtra’s labyrinthine politics, few figures are as deft or as difficult to read as Deputy Chief Minister and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) Ajit Pawar. As nephew of Sharad Pawar, the NCP’s grand old man, Ajit has spent the past three years perfecting a political manoeuvre that allows him to be both rebel and ruler: splitting his party to join the BJP-led Mahayuti government in Mumbai, while keeping a foot in the sentimental heartland of ‘Pawarite’ politics.

That balancing act is now being tested in the municipal elections of Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad, two cities that double as Ajit Pawar’s power base and political laboratory.

On paper, the arithmetic looks simple. The BJP and Ajit Pawar’s faction of the NCP are allies in the state government. Together they also share power with Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena. Yet on the ground in Pune, politics has been turned inside out. Ajit Pawar has stitched together a local understanding with his estranged uncle’s NCP faction - an alliance that has bewildered his partners in government and enraged the Congress, which promptly accused him of political double-dealing and demanded that he resign as deputy chief minister. Pawar ignored the demand, as he usually does.

Opportunistic Dealmaking

The oddity of the arrangement initially produced a curious stillness in the BJP’s ranks. Rumours swirled that Amit Shah, the Union home minister and the BJP’s chief enforcer, had given Ajit Pawar a free hand. Others speculated that the two Pawars were rehearsing a grand reunion that would eventually bring the entire NCP back into the orbit of the Narendra Modi government.

The suspense was broken this week by senior BJP leader and minister Chandrakant Patil, who chose to voice out loud what many in his party had been muttering in private. Why, he asked, have Sharad Pawar and Ajit Pawar come together? If they have done so today, might they not do so again tomorrow? And if that happens, should the BJP really be running a government with a reunited Nationalist Congress Party?

Shifting Gears

Patil’s intervention came just as Ajit Pawar had begun sharpening his rhetoric against the BJP, levelling corruption allegations that cut uncomfortably close to the bone. Until then, there had been an informal truce among the partners of the Mahayuti: fight local elections separately if necessary, but do not attack one another in public. Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena had honoured that understanding. So, initially, had Ajit Pawar. Then he changed tack.

From the BJP’s point of view, the shift was dangerous as it cannot allow Pawar’s accusations to go unanswered lest voters might actually start believing them.

The Congress, watching from the sidelines, has gleefully described the entire drama as a “fixed match.” In its telling, Ajit Pawar will rage against the BJP during the campaign, siphon off anti-BJP votes, and then dutifully return to the fold once the results are in. That may be too cynical even by Maharashtra’s standards. But it does capture a deeper truth that Pawar’s appeal lies precisely in his ability to speak in two voices at once.

For voters in Pune, this ambiguity is not merely theatrical. Ajit Pawar has spent years cultivating an image as a blunt-speaking local strongman who delivers roads, water and development. By attacking the BJP now, he taps into a reservoir of resentment among urban voters who are weary of the party’s dominance. At the same time, his position in the state government reassures business interests and cooperative barons that he remains plugged into the levers of power.

The risk is that such tactical brilliance can curdle into strategic confusion. If Pawar succeeds in mobilising a bloc of voters defined by their opposition to the BJP, what is he to do with them once the ballots are counted? Walk back into the arms of his saffron allies and risk being seen as a fraud? Or drift further towards his uncle, inviting the wrath of the party that currently keeps him in office?

The BJP, for its part, is no less conflicted. It needs Ajit Pawar’s numbers in the state assembly and his grip over the cooperative networks of western Maharashtra. But it also knows that the Pawars, uncle and nephew alike, have made careers out of using larger parties as ladders rather than lodestars. Patil’s public doubts were a thinly-veiled warning that such ambiguity has limits.

Whatever the outcome in Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad, Ajit Pawar will emerge with either proof that his two-handed game still works or a reminder that even the most agile political acrobat eventually has to choose which side of the rope he stands on.