Family members and blood relatives staging a coup are not confined to the kings and queens of the past. In the vibrant parliamentary democracies too, bloodless yet devastating takeovers by the loved ones, causing misery and emptiness have been experienced by many. Veteran Maratha strongman Sharad Pawar has joined a league of Thackerays, Abdullahs, Yadavs,Badals and Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao aka NTR who learnt the hard way, losing their fiefdom..
All eyes thus, on Pawar on how he would react to humiliating electoral defeat of 2024 Maharashtra polls where his faction of NCP finished a poor 6th with 10 assembly seats.
What is more embarrassing for Sharad Pawar is that his image as a ‘Maratha strongman’ has taken a beating and the new ‘Pawar saheb’ is his estranged nephew Ajit Pawar, having managed to become deputy chief minister for the 6th time !
Pawar was often heard taking a potshot at his former party saying those in Congress should accept that the grand old party no longer holds sway from ‘Kashmir to Kanyakumari’ like it once did. Pawar also loved narrating an anecdote about “zamindars (landlords) who have lost most of their land and are unable to maintain their ‘haveli’ (mansion). “I had told a story about Uttar Pradesh zamindars who used to have huge parcels and big ‘havelis’. Due to land ceiling legislation, their lands shrunk. The havelis remain but there is no capability (of the landlords) to maintain and repair them,” he used to mock the Congress comparing it with Zamindars of UP adding, “ When the zamindar wakes up in the morning, he looks at the surrounding green fields and says all that land belongs to him. It was his once but doesn’t belong to him now,” Pawar had said without realising that he would himself become a zamindar in that mould soon.
An uncharitable and fashionable view in Maharashtra and Delhi before November 23 results was that Pawar intended to sail in two boats. As per this plan, he and daughter Supriya staying in MVA and in the opposition while an ‘advance party’ of sorts, nephew Ajit Pawar and trusted lieutenant Praful Patel joining the NDA. However, the key and determining factor was the way the influential Maratha voters [ numbering over 30 per cent] would react to Ajit Pawar-BJP proximity. The voting pattern of Marathas was so comprehensive in recently concluded polls that it has left Pawar senior with no option but to merge his NCP faction with Ajit Pawar.
Ajit Pawar’s defection has been much like Chandrababu Naidu edging out father-in-law N T Ramarao or how Akhilesh Yadav had outwitted father Mulayam Singh Yadav. Ajit Pawar has shown his clout among MLAs. His Machiavellian machinations merit OTT web series having heavy doses of emotional drama, family feud and intrigue.
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 the great 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, go to Himalayas then to 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, P.A. 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 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) meet 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 P.A. 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 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 N T Ramarao. Just like Pawar, everything was going fine until August 26, 1995, nine months into NTR’s third term as chief minister of Andhra, 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
