The Maratha warrior Sharad Pawar’s third resurgence in 40 years

NEW DELHI: Nationalist Congress Party chief Sharad Pawar has once again proved he was head and shoulders above the rest of political gladiators who battled to capture Fort Mumbai for more than a month. After stitching the once unimaginable Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress alliance and turning BJP’s counter-plots on its head, Pawar has demonstrated that he was the ultimate survivor by salvaging his leadership from the brink of extinction for the third time in 40 years.
Thereby, Pawar also nixed conspiracy theories on ‘double crossing’ — which he has battled since becoming Maharashtra’s youngest CM in 1978 — by safe-guarding the NCP fort against BJP raids, even as he forced his nephew Ajit, by now laundered by the anti-corruption bureau, to return and herald formation of the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi government. Retaining his credibility is also likely to see closure of Delhi’s ‘chat shops’ that have periodically stoked 10 Janpath’s embers of distrust for Pawar.

“BJP committed the cardinal mistake of waking up a sleeping lion,” said an NDA MP. Pawar watchers would vouch his three fight-backs displayed his endurance as well as killer instincts. Pawar faced his first big crisis in 1980 when Indira Gandhi sacked his government, leaving his Congress (S) in a spot. His troubles intensified when Congress, with tacit support from Shiv Sena, won the 1980 polls and installed AR Antulay as CM. It soon poached around 50 of Pawar’s 58 MLAs but he remained afloat by networking with opposition leaders such as Chandra Shekhar and Parkash Singh Badal.

However, the sympathy wave following Indira Gandhi’s assassination marred Pawar’s plans of making a comeback in 1985. His party suffered a second mass desertion to Congress. A pragmatic Pawar merged his party into Congress, braving opposition of senior Congress leaders only to soon become Maharashtra CM again. Similarly, despite forming NCP, following the break-up with Sonia Gandhi in 1999 over the ‘foreigner issue’, Pawar easily worked out a Congress-NCP alliance till 2014 in Maharashtra and for 10 years, since 2004, in Delhi.

However, the recent Maharashtra assembly polls was the greatest challenge he faced as the Modi-led government and the Fadnavis regime went all out to politically finish him off. BJP engineered defections of over 20 senior NCP leaders and pledged to demolish his Baramati fort by 2024. It was a departure from BJP’s tradition of subtly humouring Sonia Gandhi’s ‘foe’. The Vajpayee regime had even bestowed Pawar with a Cabinet rank, despite being in the opposition, by making him chairman of the National Disaster Management Authority. BJP’s aggression against Pawar surprise many as PM Modi had called him ‘guru’ when he visited Baramati in the initial years of his regime.

A determined Pawar used his organisational prowess and tapped loyalty of Marathas and other anti-BJP segments to turn BJP’s all-out attack into a stunning fight back, the most telling image of which was his campaign in the rain in Satara that eventually drenched BJP’s electoral math. The latest success is likely to refuel Pawar’s enduring ambition for the ‘throne’ in Delhi that has always eluded him. It’s a fate he shares with Maratha kings. For now, however, the focus of political watchers will be on the mystery behind Ajit Pawar’s short-lived partnership with BJP and return. Whether it was misadventure or whether the nephew was a Trojan horse sent to carry out a few twisted plots may remain in the realm of speculation.