“I also thanked him (Ajit Pawar) for calling me at 7 am on my birthday on 20 January, as he does every year. And I said, I will wait by my phone at 7 am on 20 January, 2027, too,” Mhatre said.
That call will, unfortunately, not come anymore.
Ajit Pawar, 66, died early Wednesday morning when his private aircraft crash landed in Baramati, the home turf of the Pawar family. The accident also left two members of the crew, as well as two personnel (personal security officer and an attendant), dead.
He will be known as the longest-serving deputy CM of Maharashtra, though non-consecutively, so far. He has occupied that office six times. And while he nourished an ambition to lead the state from the front, take up the CM’s post, that desire will now remain unfulfilled.
“He was a great orator. Today Maharashtra is in grief. He wanted to be CM. If he had become CM, then Maharashtra would have got a good administrator, but unfortunately he couldn’t become one,” said Sanjay Raut, Rajya Sabha MP from the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena, speaking with reporters.
CM Devendra Fadnavis remembered Ajit Pawar as “damdar” (powerful) and “dildar” (generous), while deputy CM Eknath Shinde described him as “rokhthok“, someone who is straightforward and who never minced words.
Bureaucrats in Mantralaya remember Pawar as a politician with the best attendance in the secretariat. Unless he was travelling for work, he would be in his office at 8 am every day. He would call people for appointments as early as 6 am, and would even schedule his field visits at 5 am or 6 am, making it a habit for bureaucrats working with him to start their day very early.
Speaking to ThePrint before the 2024 state assembly polls, Shinde, who was then CM and is now deputy CM, had said: “Between Ajit dada, Devendraji (CM Devendra Fadnavis) and me, we run the government 24X7.”
“Ajit dada takes the early morning shift, Devendraji is there during the day, and I take the night shift,” Shinde said, referring to his habit of working very late into the night.
Also Read: Why Ajit Pawar’s battle in Pune brings up flashbacks of 2017 BJP-Shiv Sena fight in Mumbai
The phenomenon that was ‘Ajit dada’
Ajit Pawar was very unlike his uncle Sharad Pawar or cousin Supriya Sule in the way he carried himself in public life.
Deep frowns, tart words, and rude dismissals of his followers were all part of the package that “Ajit dada” was.
His most controversial statement to date—“should I pee to fill up empty dams”—made at a time when distressed farmers were complaining to him about acute water shortage in April 2013, was a gaffe caused by this very demeanour. He later apologised for “hurting people’s sentiments”.
His brash, rustic style of speaking meant that he found himself in such sticky spots one too many times. Last year, he rebuked a young IPS officer, Anjana Krishna, who was taking action against illegal sand mining. On a call with Krishna, the video of which went viral, Pawar purportedly chided her when she was taking action against illegal soil excavation in a Solapur village.
“Itna aapko daring hua kya?… main tere upar action lunga (how come you are acting in such a daring way? I will take action against you),” he purportedly said over the phone, when she was heard saying: “How do I know if this is really the deputy CM on the phone?”
Party leaders had then defended Ajit Pawar, saying it was simply “his style of speaking”.
Later last year, he faced flak for snapping at a farmer in Marathwada who had lost his crops in the floods.
The deputy CM was meeting farmers affected by the floods at a village in Bhoom-Paranda taluk of Dharashiv district. When a farmer asked him if the government would declare a loan waiver for them, he said: “Why don’t we make him the chief minister? Don’t you think we understand? Are we here to play gottya (marbles)? I have been working since 6 am. You are trying to suppress (the voice of) those who are working.”
NCP members close to him say they saw the man beyond the caustic words.
“In reality, Ajit dada is as sweet as the aam ras (mango juice) on my plate,” an NCP leader once told ThePrint over a Gujarati thali (meal).
Ajit Pawar’s political journey
Ajit Pawar’s plunge into politics was in 1991 when he was elected as chairman of Pune district cooperative bank.
The same year, he successfully contested the Lok Sabha election from Baramati on a Congress ticket. He let the seat go for his uncle to be elected and instead contested the Baramati MLA seat that year. He has held the assembly constituency ever since.
In those early days, with Ajit Pawar being the only other member of the Pawar family in politics, many had hailed him as the heir-apparent—a notion that was shaken by Sule’s entry into politics in 2006.
Ajit Pawar gradually rose through the ranks, serving as a junior minister, then cabinet minister and deputy chief minister under multiple CMs of the Congress, Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena, Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and now the BJP.
If Sharad Pawar, founder of the undivided NCP, is described as a PM-in-waiting, his nephew, who openly expressed ambitions to occupy the Maharashtra government’s top post, was a CM-in-waiting.
The closest he came to the post was perhaps in 2004, when the NCP won 71 seats against the Congress’ 69 in Maharashtra, but the former relinquished its claim for the CM post and instead negotiated for some key departments.
Ajit Pawar admitted this to be a miscalculation by his party colleagues in an interview with a Marathi television channel, IBN Lokmat, in February 2024.
The deepest scar in Ajit Pawar’s entire political journey was perhaps the allegations of Rs 70,000-crore irrigation scam where contracts to build dams were supposedly inflated in value when he was the water resources minister. The allegations led to his resignation from the Maharashtra Cabinet in 2012. In December 2019, the Maharashtra Anti-Corruption Bureau gave him the clean chit in the case.
Also Read: Internal fighting saw Mahayuti & MVA form unlikely ties in some seats. How they fared in Maharashtra
The rebellious nephew
As legend goes, the words ‘kaka mala vachva’ (uncle, save me) can still be heard reverberating through the walls of Pune’s Shaniwar Wada, the seat of the Peshwas, on some nights.
Back in the 1700s, Maharashtra saw one of the most brutal uncle-nephew feuds when Raghunathrao, who coveted the throne, planned the assassination of the ninth Peshwa, his nephew Narayanrao, and turned a deaf ear to his cries for help.
The game of thrones continued into modern politics as well, though it was not quite as barbaric as the Raghunathrao-Narayanrao conflict. Maharashtra’s politics has seen many uncle-nephew rifts: Bal Thackeray and Raj Thackeray, Gopinath Munde and Dhananjay Munde, and even Sharad Pawar and Ajit Pawar.
The political corridors of Maharashtra had been sporadically abuzz with talks of a rift within the Pawar family over the question of Sharad Pawar’s political legacy since 2006, when Sule formally entered politics by contesting a by-election to the parliamentary seat of Baramati—the Pawar bastion.
The unease over succession, however, never grew into an open conflict till 2019.
That year, till about 11 pm or so on 22 November, Ajit Pawar was with leaders from the then undivided Shiv Sena and the Congress. A plan to install the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government under Uddhav Thackeray had been formalised. The leaders were, however, in for a shock when visuals of Ajit Pawar at Raj Bhavan started doing the rounds in the early hours of 23 November, when it was still dark.
Ajit Pawar joined hands with the BJP to form a 72-hour government before returning to the MVA fold when one after the other, NCP MLAs who had initially shown support to him trickled back to the Sharad Pawar camp. Despite the misgivings, Ajit Pawar was given the post of deputy CM.
Then in 2023, Ajit Pawar ripped the band aid off. He walked out of the Sharad Pawar-led party with the majority of NCP MLAs in tow, claiming to be the real NCP, and joining hands with the Mahayuti alliance of the BJP and Shinde-led Shiv Sena. He took up the deputy CM’s post in that government too, first under CM Shinde and then, after the 2024 assembly polls, under CM Fadnavis.
In his first show of strength immediately after the open rebellion, Pawar had unequivocally articulated the insecurities he had felt within the Sharad Pawar-led party.
Speaking at the first meeting of the party’s rank and file after taking oath as deputy CM in the Mahayuti, he said: “Amhi konacha poti janmala alo, hyat kay chuk ahe amchi? (how is it our fault that we were born in someone else’s womb).”
He had to not only prove that he held command over the NCP workers and voters in Maharashtra, but also over the Pawar family bastion of Baramati, the crown jewel for both the NCPs. For that, he introduced his wife, Sunetra Pawar, to politics, pitting her against cousin Sule in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, which Sunetra lost. She was later accommodated as a Rajya Sabha MP.
The people of Baramati were torn, and so they chose status quo: Sule for MP and Ajit Pawar for MLA, as he won the second round on his home turf, defeating his nephew, Yugendra Pawar, in the state assembly polls later in 2024.
That election, Ajit Pawar also amply established his NCP’s dominance over Sharad Pawar’s, winning 41 of the 54 seats the party contested, as against the Sharad Pawar-led NCP’s 10.
That election, Ajit Pawar was seen in a very different avatar, sporting an onion pink jacket, shaking hands with the electorate and recording reels for social media.
“In 2014, when the Modi wave had gripped the country and social media was a new phenomenon, Ajit dada had called me once, as usual at 6 am, at his official bungalow to ask about social media. I gave him a few ideas. There was a subsequent meeting, but after that Ajit dada said, he doesn’t believe in all of this and doesn’t need to do it,” a Mumbai-based political consultant told ThePrint.
“Ten years later, that same Ajit dada hired an entire agency for publicity and branding in the media,” he added.
Restlessness within Mahayuti
Of late, the leader was getting restless in the Mahayuti, with there being an intense power tussle among the top three leaders—Fadnavis, Shinde and Pawar. Two ministers of Ajit Pawar’s party had to resign since the second Mahayuti government came to power.
Dhananjay Munde stepped down in March 2025 after his right-hand man was arrested in a case related to the murder of a sarpanch in Beed district.
Manikrao Kokate, who was first stripped off the agriculture portfolio after his repeated foot-in-mouth situations, resigned in December 2025 after a Nashik sessions court confirmed his conviction in a 1995 case.
Further, the allegations of land grab against Ajit Pawar’s son, Parth, in November 2025, and CM Fadnavis’ quick reaction to it, ordering an inquiry, also weakened Ajit Pawar’s position within the Mahayuti.
The local body polls to municipal councils and corporations across Maharashtra were especially tough to fight as an alliance and sparked off talks of there being a real possibility of the two NCPs reuniting, something that Ajit Pawar didn’t deny when repeatedly asked in interviews.
While the BJP and Shinde-led Shiv Sena still tied up at a few places during this month’s polls to municipal corporations, the Ajit Pawar-led NCP, a traditional rival, was being increasingly seen as a third wheel.
When the BJP and Ajit Pawar-led NCP decided to contest the Pune and Pimpri Chinchwad corporation polls as a “friendly fight”, it was Ajit Pawar who first made the pitch shriller, taking on the BJP’s local leaders over corruption. He tied up with the Sharad Pawar-led NCP to fight the election and focussed every ounce of energy on Pune district, but ended up dejected and defeated.
His debilitating loss in Pune and an embarrassing defeat in Pimpri Chinchwad shaved several inches off his political stature as the BJP took a decisive lead in both these urban bodies.
“Ajit Pawar’s support structure in the Pune district included the local elites, the landowning Marathas. After 1999, these families in politics left the Congress, acting out against Suresh Kalmadi and joined the NCP. Post 2014, they left the NCP and joined the BJP. So, the people delivering the wins are the same; it is just that their party has changed,” Nitin Birmal, associate professor at Pune’s Dr Ambedkar College of Arts & Commerce, told ThePrint.
“Ajit Pawar’s urban power centres were mostly Pune, Ahilyanagar, and Solapur—most of these have crumbled. This will cost him his bargaining power within the Mahayuti,” Birmal had said after the civic poll results on 16 January.
Ajit Pawar had shrugged off the loss, and started preparing for polls to 125 panchayat samitis and 12 zilla parishads on 5 February, which the two NCPs once again decided to contest together. On Wednesday, he was on his way to Baramati for a few scheduled campaign rallies.
For MLAs close to him, Ajit Pawar was a “perfectionist”.
Speaking to ThePrint, one NCP MLA recalled how in 2022, when Ajit Pawar was finance minister in the MVA government, he commissioned a Chhatrapati Sambhaji memorial (Maratha warrior king Chhatrapati Shivaji’s son) at Vadu Budruk village in Pune district, and involved himself in all the details of the project, right from its design.
Ajit Pawar loyalists also agree that their leader had no national ambitions. He didn’t have a good command over English and Hindi, like Sule, nor did he have equations with national leaders the way she does, they said.
He only ever wanted control of Maharashtra, politically and administratively—a dream that had started growing distant amid Maharashtra’s political churns, the Mahayuti power tussles and the local body poll results. On Wednesday, it was wiped out.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
Also Read: Why Ajit Pawar doesn’t want to back his son Parth, battling allegations of a land scam
