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Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra Ajit Pawar (67) died in a plane crash in Baramati on Wednesday, January 28. He was a senior leader of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and nephew of veteran politician Sharad Pawar.
Pawar left from Mumbai to his hometown, Baramati, to address four public rallies in a chartered flight along with his security staff. The chartered flight was carrying six people, including a pilot, three passengers and a crew member, and all have been declared dead. The reasons for the crash are yet to be ascertained.
Reports citing the eyewitnesses say the aircraft attempted landing and swerved to a side and crashed. The plane went up in flames even as emergency services approached it.
Ajit Pawar rose to prominence first as the water resources and irrigation minister in the NCP-Congress government in Maharashtra in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He later served as the Deputy Chief Minister six times, under multiple governments and alliances.
He held the position twice during the long Congress-NCP alliance government that ruled the state from 1999 to 2014. The first time he became Deputy Chief Minister was in 2010 when the NCP-Congress coalition was in power, and he returned to the same office again in 2012 after resigning earlier that year amid a corruption controversy but being re-inducted into the ministry.
However, his tenure was repeatedly overshadowed by allegations of corruption, particularly linked to irrigation projects. In 2012, he resigned following accusations of irregularities in dam construction, though he was later cleared by investigative agencies.
Ajit Pawar’s political career was marked by dramatic twists. In November 2019, he stunned the political establishment by briefly aligning with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to form a short-lived government with Devendra Fadnavis, a move that collapsed within days. The episode cemented his image as a bold, if unpredictable, political operator.
In July 2023, Pawar engineered a major split in the NCP, taking a significant section of party legislators with him and joining the BJP-led Mahayuti government as Deputy Chief Minister. The move fractured the party founded by Sharad Pawar and reshaped Maharashtra’s political landscape. Ajit Pawar was later recognised by the Election Commission as leader of the NCP faction, intensifying the intra-family and intra-party rivalry.
Born on July 22, 1959, in Deolali Pravara in Ahmednagar district, Ajit Pawar was the nephew of Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) founder Sharad Pawar. He entered politics in the shadow of his uncle but quickly carved out a reputation as a decisive organiser and mass leader, emerging as a threat to Sharad Pawar’s daughter Supriya Sule.
Pawar began his legislative career in 1991 when he was elected to the Maharashtra Assembly from Baramati. Over the years, he won the constituency multiple times, transforming it into a Pawar family stronghold.
Ajit Pawar was recently embroiled in a major political controversy after a land deal involving his son, Parth Pawar, sparked allegations of irregularities and possible misuse of public property.
It is alleged that the Maharashtra government sold a 40-acre plot of land in Pune’s upscale Mundhwa area to Amadea Enterprises LLP, a firm in which Parth Pawar is a partner, for around Rs 300 crore, even though its estimated market value was close to Rs 1,800 crore.
Former Andhra Pradesh CM YS Rajasekhar Reddy died in a similar manner when his helicopter crashed in Nallamalla forest due to bad weather and poor visibility on September 9, 2009.