A famous cricketer announcing retirement explained the timing: Retire when people ask why now, and not why not? Any backtracking by Sharad Pawar by “agreeing to the overwhelming demand of the people and party colleagues” to withdraw his resignation as NCP chief will be widely seen as farcical, meant to hold back his ambitious nephew Ajit Pawar from rocking the boat. Also, a convoluted ruse to deny the NCP leadership to Ajit would widen the fissures already visible to anyone willing to see. So, the honourable course for the wily Maratha chieftain, who at 82 is not in the pink of health, is to eschew the temptation to hand over the party to daughter Supriya Sule, and allow the only grassroots leader capable of keeping the motley crowd of legislators and followers together, that is, Ajit, to assume formal charge. Otherwise, both the senior Pawar and the NCP will open themselves up to rebellion.
Ajit Pawar's dilemma
Weeks before Sharad Pawar sprang the “surprise” there were reports of Ajit going his own separate way, teaming up with the Bharatiya Janata Party and eventually altering the fragile arrangement between the Shinde Sena and the BJP and, consequently, within the Uddhav Sena and the remainder of what passes for the Maha Vikas Aghadi. Should the senior Pawar choose to become a sort of Margdarshak, with Ajit holding the reins of the party he founded back in 1999 after opportunistically dumping the Sonia-led Congress, there is a chance that the NCP might yet survive in one piece. However much the father might want Supriya to take his place at the head of the NCP, the truth is that aside from the self-serving courtiers around him and a few fine-dine Mumbai-based sophisticates, she woefully lacks the political nous and grassroots contact to grow NCP. Ajit, on the other hand, though as venal as the rest of the NCP lot, is a shrewd politician who can manoeuvre and manipulate the ever increasing fractious and intricate Maharasthra politics where netas change party loyalties as ordinary people change their morning clothes. Lest this be construed as a plea for permissive politics, it ought to be clarified that when everyone is out pursuing naked power politics, Ajit seems most capable of keeping the Maharashtra-specific brand alive. Under Sule, it has little chance of survival. The NCP founder should learn from the experience of Sonia Gandhi who despite the multiple failures of son Rahul refuses to forsake son-love for the sake of more than 138-year-old Indian National Congress.
High emotional drama
The fact that in the amidst of high emotional drama at the Y B Chavan Auditorium on Tuesday — where rootless courtiers and other hangers-on pleaded with the patriarch to defy his age and the demands of the political situation and carry on shouldering the responsibility of keeping the flock together — it was Ajit alone who had the gumption to strike a discordant note: Let the uncle pass the baton to a younger member. In a way, it was a snub for the likes of Praful Patel, Chhagan Bhujbal, Jitendra Ahwad, etc, who see immediate diminution of their role should Ajit succeed Pawar Senior. We are no soothsayers and have no clue how the inner drama in the extended Pawar family will pan out. But one thing is certain. Pawar cannot change his decision to quit as the formal boss of the party without inflicting damage to his own and his party’s public standing. It is best he avoids that farce.
Meanwhile, though there will be time and space to discuss threadbare some of the revelations in the second part of his autobiography, one thing that stands out is the public rebuke of Uddhav Thackeray. He says that he lacks both administrative skills and political acumen, two prerequisites for any ambitious politician keen to head a political party and state administration. Probably, it was such basic lack of nous that allowed a nobody like Sanjay Raut to manipulate him into ways which would eventually cause a vertical split in the Shiv Sena and force it to sup with the Congress party, vanquishing which was the life-long ambition of Sena founder Balasaheb Thackeray. Pawar’s resignation is bound to alter inner and intra-party equations in Maharashtra politics. The sooner the state of uncertainty and flux in the once well-governed state ends, the better. The BJP-Shinde governing arrangement had always looked tentative. After the churn at the top in the NCP it looks far more temporary. Time Maharashtra got a stable and able government. And that time was yesterday.
