A little over two and a half months after the Nationalist Congress Party president and Maharashtra deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar's sudden death, the party is now clearly at a crossroads, and there is a lot of speculation about which way it is headed. The situation is a bit complex, and the challenges before the NCP seem steep, as Maharashtra's ruling coalition leader, the BJP, takes more and more space in the NCP's political bastions, and the party itself is going through internal strife.
Towards the end of 2025, there was a clear buzz that the two factions of the NCP were contemplating some kind of a merger. In fact, both factions fought the municipal polls and the district council polls, which happened in the first two months of 2026, together under the same election symbol—the clock. It is believed that as many as 13 meetings took place between the leaders of both the factions to decide the details of the merger, including the ministerial portfolios to be offered to the two senior leaders of the NCP. It was decided that after the district council or zilla parishad poll results came out, on February 12, 2026, the two factions would announce their merger and be a part of the ruling NDA alliance in Maharashtra as well as at the parliamentary level.
All these plans changed with the sudden death of Ajit Pawar. It is widely believed that Ajit Pawar's two deputies were very uncomfortable with the prospect of the two factions coming together in his absence under the leadership of Sharad Pawar. This pushed them to quickly make Ajit Pawar's wife, Sunetra Pawar, take over the mantle of Deputy Chief Minister of the state. Their plan was to take full control of the party through her. But by the first week of April, it was clear that the plan had failed, as Sunetra wrote a letter to the Election Commission of India, stating that she would be, henceforth, controlling the NCP and any communication made by other leaders of the party in the past few weeks should be held null and void. Some insiders say that Sunetra Pawar is now being guided by Sharad Pawar himself, and the division within the NCP now is not between the two factions but between the Pawar family loyalists on the one hand and other independent leaders on the other. This creates a new challenge before Sunetra—to run the party with some leaders who might be looking at undermining her authority and taking control of the party while handling administrative jobs as members of the Maharashtra state cabinet.
There has been some talk in the political circles about how well Sunetra Pawar will be able to handle the responsibilities and the challenges before her. She seems to be doing better than what was expected originally of her when it comes to handling the political aspects of running the NCP as an organisation. In this task, she is supported by both her sons, Parth and Jay Pawar. The same cannot be said about her administrative prowess, as it is too early to make any assessment about the policy decisions she has made related to the ministries she is handling.
The NCP faces tough political times ahead, as the party is known mainly as a "Pawar family-centric" political organisation, which has now lost its main face—Ajit Pawar. As for the other towering figure Sharad Pawar, he seems to be struggling with severe limitations due to health reasons. The second damaging aspect seems to be that the party, which has predominantly had a Maratha voter base, now does not have a reliable Maratha face as its next-gen leader with the right amount of seniority and experience.
Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has publicly said a few times that the BJP and the NCP do not consider each other "natural alliance partners"; they are "political partners" who have come together as a compromise or adjustment of sorts. This now is slowly becoming more and more evident in Ajit Pawar's absence. In the recent district council polls, and even before, the BJP was seen aggressively poaching local-level leaders from the NCP, challenging the NCP in its political bastions, and undermining the party wherever possible. The NCP now stands at a crossroads with a couple of options open before it. The first is to surrender to the BJP and play second fiddle to it, and the second is to take the BJP head-on as the saffron party tries to subsume its smaller partners. Will the NCP go ahead on the path its founder, Sharad Pawar, and his family want to take, or will it move along the path the BJP wants it to go along? That is now the big question.
Rohit Chandavarkar is a senior journalist who has worked for 31 years with various leading newspaper brands and television channels in Mumbai and Pune.
