The death of NCP leader Ajit Pawar, regarded as one of Maharashtra’s most seasoned and grounded politicians, comes at a time regional parties are struggling to stay relevant amid the BJP’s growing dominance in the second-most politically significant state.

The passing of Ajit Dada, as he was popularly known, has also dealt a major blow to the influential Pawar family, enervated by the bitter split in the party in 2023 that saw Ajit step out of the shadow of his uncle and mentor Sharad Pawar and align with the BJP. With the senior Pawar now in the twilight of his political career, the family is left without a leader who commands comparable mass appeal.

In the civic elections held earlier this month, the two rival factions of the NCP had set aside their differences and joined forces to check the BJP’s advance in their traditional strongholds at the Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad municipal corporations. However, the gambit failed to pay off, with the BJP sweeping both civic bodies.

Maharashtra, which sends the second highest number of MPs to the Lok Sabha after Uttar Pradesh, has been witnessing a sustained political churn since the 2019 Assembly elections. Ajit’s death is expected to further reshape the state’s power equations and could even have a bearing on broader national political alignments.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, centre, and Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde mourn the demise of Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar, who died in a plane crash, in Baramati. PTI

The upheaval began with the BJP’s oldest ally, the Shiv Sena, crossing over to the Opposition camp after the 2019 polls, followed by a split in the party in 2022 and the subsequent division in the NCP the next year.

The immediate impact of Ajit’s death is expected to be felt within the NCP faction led by him, with leaders who had broken away from Sharad now confronting a leadership vacuum. It is widely believed that his demise will accelerate efforts to reunite the two warring factions of the party, a reconciliation that Ajit himself was said to be
actively pursuing.

Members of the divided Pawar family came together in grief on Wednesday.

Reunification efforts, however, are unlikely to be smooth as they could once again divide leaders of the two factions on whether to side with the ruling BJP or the Opposition Congress. While a majority of leaders in the Ajit-led faction had favoured an alliance with the BJP, Sharad is learnt to have remained firm on his long-held position of never aligning with the saffron camp.

“After Ajit Pawar’s death, the NCP would be like a rudderless ship. Sharad Pawar is in his twilight years and several leaders could eventually gravitate towards the BJP,” said an NCP leader from Pune.

The immediate challenge before the party is to identify a successor to Ajit to lead his faction. While many NCP leaders privately acknowledge that his wife Sunetra, a Rajya Sabha member, could be the natural choice, others argued that she lacked the political experience to manage the party at this critical juncture.

“Sunetra Pawar had largely maintaned a low profile and entered active politics only in 2024,” said an NCP leader. Ajit’s son and businessman Parth Pawar had stepped back from politics after his unsuccessful attempt to contest the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

While Ajit’s passing is seen as an opportunity for the BJP to further consolidate its dominance in Maharashtra — particularly in the Pawar family’s stronghold of western Maharashtra — party strategists believe that, in the short term, it could deprive chief minister Devendra Fadnavis of a key lever to keep ally Eknath Shinde in check.

The BJP-led Mahayuti government has two major allies — the Shiv Sena faction led by Shinde and the NCP faction headed by Ajit. Although the BJP enjoys a dominant position with 132 seats in the 288-member Assembly, it continues to rely on the support of 57 Shinde Sena MLAs and 41 from the NCP.

Shinde is widely regarded as a tough negotiator and is said to still nurse resentment over being edged out of the chief minister’s post by Fadnavis after the 2024 Assembly polls. Against this backdrop, Fadnavis was believed to have relied on Ajit to balance Shinde’s influence within the alliance.