A confidant says he wanted all rumours about differences between family and party, Ajit’s unhappiness to be thrashed out in public domain – and did just that
RESIGNATION is a ploy political leaders in India have used before to quell rebellions. But never as neatly as this.
On Tuesday, Sharad Govindrao Pawar announced he was resigning as the president of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), sending shock and awe running down party and rival ranks. On Wednesday and Thursday, the NCP went through the usual sequence of emotions – other resignations, an immolation attempt, tears, appeals to stay. On Friday, a party panel met to decide Pawar’s “successor”; it concluded by rejecting his resignation. Minutes later, Pawar, displaying just a tad emotion, declared that, all things considered, he would stay on after all.
In three days, the 82-year-old had shown why he is a survivor of over 50 years in politics: the Ajit Pawar potential rebellion now has an even bigger mountain to climb, the road to Sharad Pawar’s daughter Supriya Sule ascension is clearer, and naysayers have been shown – again – who is the boss in the NCP.
Having been outsmarted one too many times by his uncle and mentor, Ajit might find fewer NCP MLAs willing to bet on him in the coming days. The seniors in the party, long-time loyalists of Pawar, are anyway – to a person — more comfortable with Sule.
Since Pawar Senior is not a man easily given to emotions – rather the opposite – clearly he knew exactly how the script would play out when he made his surprise resignation announcement. An insider in the NCP said, “Pawar chose to put out everything in the public domain, to defuse growing talk of unrest within the NCP and of ugly differences between the party and his parivar. The Ajit Pawar versus Jayant Patil tussle is well-known, but the larger concern was Ajit Pawar’s ambition to take control of the organisation.”
At the press conference on Friday, Pawar Senior didn’t just emphasise that NCP leaders didn’t want him to leave, he pointedly mentioned that leaders of other parties like Rahul Gandhi and Sitaram Yechury had asked him to stay. That there was no parallel to him in the NCP was obvious.
So where does that leave Ajit, who incidentally was a notable absentee at the press conference? While he issued a statement later welcoming his uncle’s decision to withdraw his resignation and asserting that “the NCP is united”, could the junior have overreached himself once too often?
Clearly tired of waiting in the wings, Ajit has been working his way to the centre trying several tactics since the 2019 Assembly election results showed a window. What was different this time was persistent talk from his camp that he also had the needed MLA numbers with him.
A former NCP minister close to Pawar said, “His biggest concern is to keep the party united, and hence he will never hand over the leadership reins to Ajit, because he knows it will unsettle senior leaders.” According to the ex-minister, “These senior leaders who have closely worked with Pawar for three decades have always made Sule their rallying point to check Ajit.”
Ahead of 2024, when the Opposition is banking on Pawar to play a major role as a glue plus elder statesman, he needed to first have his own house in order, a senior observer pointed out.