Opinion | How Nephew Ajit’s Betrayal Would Hurt Sharad Pawar For The Rest Of His Life

“For there to be betrayal, there would have to have been trust first.”

― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

Have current political developments in Maharashtra reduced the mighty Sharad Pawar to Taraka Rama Rao aka NTR like the situation of 1995 when NTR’s son-in-law Chandrababu Naidu had upstaged and outwitted him comprehensively?

A politician among politicians, Sharad Pawar, 83 now, holds a record of sorts having never lost an electoral battle, a distinction that eluded even former prime ministers like Indira Gandhi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

Looking back at Pawar’s impressive political career, the politician offers a bag full of turning the tables on friends and associates and taking political U-turns. Pawar had several opportunities to cut nephew Ajit Pawar to size but the illusion of grandeur and family pressure from his wife and sister-in-law forced Pawar’s hands. In 2012, when Prithviraj Chavan was heading the coalition government in Maharashtra and Ajit Pawar had resigned, Chavan kept asking Pawar to sack his nephew. Pawar kept dithering and Ajit Pawar, bereft of support within the NCP then, made a comeback.

In 2019 too, when Ajit Pawar had joined hands with Devendra Fadnavis, top Congress and Shiv Sena leadership had advised Pawar to act against Ajit Pawar swiftly, but the nephew got away lightly. According to some close associates, Pawar was enjoying a cat-and-mouse game with Ajit Pawar, supremely confident that as long as he was alive and had a trusted aide like Praful Patel, he would always bring Ajit Pawar to his knees.

However, Ajit Pawar’s speech at Bandra where 29 NCP MLAs showed up on Wednesday, revealed that the nephew had scant regard for his uncle and for long, he had been looking for an opportunity to deal a blow.

In these hours of betrayal and isolation, if Pawar chooses to reflect upon the past, he would have a rich collection of memories. He had become Maharashtra chief minister for the first time aged just 38 in 1978 when he treacherously toppled the Congress government of Vasantdada Patil, split the party and formed a government in coalition with the Janata Party under the banner of the Progressive Democratic Front.

When Indira Gandhi made a remarkable political comeback in 1980, Pawar was part of Congress [S]. Old-timers recall how Pawar had then commented that he would prefer to take sanyas, and go to the Himalayas, rather than join Indira Congress. In 1986, Pawar merged his party with the parent organisation in the presence of Rajiv Gandhi at Aurangabad.

In 1997-98, the emergence of Sonia Gandhi as supreme leader of the Congress rattled Pawar. A few days before he, PA Sanghma and Tariq Anwar revolted against Sonia on grounds of her foreign origins in May 1999, Pawar had hosted a soiree on the rear lawns of his Gurudwara Rakabganj Road bungalow which most thought, quite mistakenly, was in celebration of Sonia handing him charge of negotiations with Jayalalitha and other potential allies. Pawar in a crisp white bush-shirt chose to serve burgundy Baramati wine with a tale. “Actually, I told my leader (till then, still Sonia) that I am a visionary because I signed up an Italian collaborator for producing this wine 20 years ago.” He revealed that for the past many years, he was growing a variety of grape called Sharad Seedless named after him and has been championing the cause of wine.

Pawar seemed all reconciled to accept Sonia as his leader. However, on May 17, 1999, everyone in the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting called to finalise candidates for Goa assembly polls was growing restless, dying to catch up with India’s cricket World Cup opener in England. Then Sharad Pawar smiled and PA Sangma stood up. When the mighty Maratha signalled, the diminutive Samurai with a swish of his razor-sharp tongue built a case for how the BJP campaign against Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin was seeping deep down to even remote villages. Then came the unkindest cut. “We know very little about you, about your parents,” Sangma told her.

Mastermind Pawar had planned a revolt when a woman bureaucrat from Maharashtra had told Pawar that she had got a survey done which revealed that if he revolts against Sonia on grounds of her foreign origins, he would be hailed as “second Lokmanya Tilak”. It is a different story that when the Maharashtra Assembly polls were held, Pawar’s newly formed Nationalist Party of India finished behind the Congress and the rebel had to form a coalition government playing the role of a minor partner in the state that he once considered his fiefdom.

Pawar had many opportunities to interact with Telugu superstar NT Ramarao. Just like Pawar, everything was going fine until August 26, 1995, nine months into NTR’s third term as chief minister of Andhra Pradesh; his son-in-law and trusted lieutenant Naidu rebelled against him. Naidu defended his coup, saying he had been forced to act against his father-in-law because of NTR’s second wife Lakshmi Parvathi’s growing influence over party affairs and on the state government. Lakshmi Parvathi was NTR’s biographer and he had married her in 1993, much against his family’s wishes.

On that August day, Hyderabad saw the 72-year-old actor running amok on the city’s streets with a symbolic dagger stabbed in his back. Overnight, NTR was a nobody, his fall as dramatic as his spectacular rise, as virtually all the members of his family and most of the TDP’s 200 legislators had deserted the chief minister.

Life had, ironically, panned out exactly as NTR would often say, “What is destined to happen will happen. Victory and defeat are like light and darkness.” In The Other Side of Truth, a book published in 2009, NTR’s other son-in-law, Venkateshwara Rao, says that NTR was so enraged by Naidu’s revolt that he had asked his actor-son Nandamuri Balakrishna to “go and murder Chandrababu” for betraying him. NTR even wanted Balakrishna to show him the sword stained with Naidu’s blood.

For Pawar, the betrayal of July 2023 would be a truth that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

The writer is a Visiting Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation. A well-known political analyst, he has written several books, including ‘24 Akbar Road’ and ‘Sonia: A Biography’. Views expressed are personal.