Ajit Pawar retains Baramati bastion, settles score for LS loss

PUNE In the end, Ajit Pawar had the last laugh.
After the heavy defeat of his wife, Sunetra Pawar, in the Lok Sabha elections from the Baramati parliamentary constituency earlier this year, there were serious doubts about Ajit Pawar’s leadership credentials to steer the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in the Maharashtra assembly elections. The scepticism extended to his own candidacy on his home turf of Baramati, which is synonymous with the Pawar clan’s political legacy.
However, Ajit Pawar silenced his critics with a thumping victory in the Baramati assembly constituency, with a margin of 100,899 votes over his nephew Yugendra Pawar. This marks Ajit Pawar’s eighth consecutive victory from the constituency, cementing his dominance in what has long been considered the family’s bastion.
The victory has broader implications, not just for Pawar’s stature but also for the NCP faction he leads. His leadership in the assembly polls contributed significantly to his faction’s strong performance across Maharashtra, putting to rest questions raised about his ability to rally support and manage a party he divided in 2023.
“My victory in Baramati by over 1 lakh votes underlines the work I have done for the people. It is also a stamp on the work done by the Mahayuti government,” said Ajit Pawar, who had won by a margin of over 165,000 votes in 2019.
The contest in Baramati was as much about electoral politics as it was about family dynamics. Ajit Pawar’s 32-year-old nephew, Yugendra Pawar, had the backing of NCP founder Sharad Pawar, who personally oversaw his campaign. The candidacy of Yugendra, who was making his poll debut, was seen as a bid to reclaim the party’s legacy after Ajit Pawar’s dramatic rebellion in 2023, when he split the NCP and took 39 other NCP MLAs with him to the Mahayuti, along with the party’s official symbol.
Ajit Pawar, aware of the challenge, campaigned more cautiously and avoided any personal attack on his uncle and family patriarch. In the end, his ground-level network, control over the local party machinery, and years of rapport with Baramati’s electorate worked in his favour. His win reinforces his position as a formidable leader in Maharashtra politics, despite the rift in the Pawar family.
The voters, on their part, preferred continuity instead of handing the baton to a new generation, a point Sharad Pawar had underlined in his campaign. Sunetra Pawar, now a Rajya Sabha member, termed Ajit Pawar’s victory in Baramati as the “actual verdict” of the people. “I am thankful to the people of Baramati for once again showing their trust in Ajit Pawar and rallying behind him. They showed that Baramati is his family,” she said.
Ajit Pawar’s victory also sends a message to the broader political community that he is not just a breakaway leader but one capable of retaining loyalty and delivering results, even against a united opposition. However, questions linger about how long Ajit can sustain this momentum, especially with the BJP-led Mahayuti alliance, with whom his party has ideological differences, looming large in Maharashtra.
The Baramati election outcome is likely to further strain the already tenuous relationship between Ajit and Sharad Pawar, at least in the short term. More significantly, the defeat on home turf underscores the challenges Sharad Pawar faces in rebuilding his faction of the NCP. This is the first time the 83-year-old has suffered the setback in Baramati, where he has been invincible since 1967. If anything, it’s a blow to his efforts to portray himself as the custodian of the NCP’s legacy.