After trouncing his nephew Ajit Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in the Lok Sabha election, NCP (SP) chief Sharad Pawar has begun a whirlwind campaign in the Baramati Assembly segment in a bid to supplant the younger Pawar in the upcoming Maharashtra Assembly election.
On June 19, the 83-year-old Mr. Sharad Pawar, on a three-day tour of drought-affected villages in Baramati, expressed confidence in the NCP (SP) coming to power in Maharashtra after the Assembly election.
Speaking at Baramati’s Nira-Wagaj village, the octogenarian leader assured farmers that his party would resolve their problems once the NCP (SP) came to power.
“At present, both the Central and State governments are not ruled by us. But we have seen the work they did in the Lok Sabha election. If this is repeated in the State Assembly election, I cannot see how the reins of the State government will not come into our [Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi’s] hands. All the issues pertaining to farmers can be resolved if the power of the State government comes into our hands,” Mr. Sharad Pawar said.
He was accompanied by his grand-nephew Yugendra Pawar - Mr. Ajit Pawar’s nephew who has parted ways politically with his uncle by going over to Mr. Sharad Pawar’s side. Yugendra is being widely projected as a possible candidate against his own uncle, Mr. Ajit Pawar, who has remained an unbeaten legislator from the Baramati Assembly segment a record seven times since 1991.
This is the second time in less than a week that Mr. Sharad Pawar has undertaken a three-day tour of Baramati (he did one last week), hinting at the NCP patriarch’s determination to break his nephew’s stranglehold over Baramati.
The high-prestige Baramati Lok Sabha contest saw Mr. Sharad Pawar’s daughter Supriya Sule trounce Sunetra Pawar (Mr. Ajit Pawar’s wife) despite younger Pawar throwing in the weight of his Mahayuti allies – the BJP and the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena in the fray.
While Mr. Ajit Pawar had hoped to bog down his uncle in the Baramati Lok Sabha seat during the election campaign, the exact opposite occurred with Mr. Sharad Pawar managing to upstage his nephew in the constituency. The canny NCP patriarch is hoping to repeat the same feat ahead of the Assembly election as well.
The NCP (SP) also inflicted major defeats on the BJP and the Mr. Ajit Pawar-led NCP candidates in other seats like Beed, Ahmednagar and Shirur, eventually winning eight of 10 seats it contested on.
Even during the time of the undivided NCP, a common complaint among the electorate who voted against the Pawar clan had been the persistence of the water scarcity issue, and that the problems of drought-hit villages had not been adequately addressed despite the Pawar family touting Baramati city as a development model to be emulated across the country.
This time, ahead of the Assembly election, Sharad Pawar appears determined to address these issues by giving the electorate confidence that his party would be the best bet in solving these problems, say observers, who note that Pawar is bent on resolving the “Achilles Heel” of water scarcity in several villages across Baramati.
Published - June 19, 2024 08:56 pm IST
