Third Man

The unfulfilled ambitions of Sharad Pawar

By NEERJA CHOWDHURY | 1 April 2014
|ONE|

ON SUNDAY, 9 March, bad weather forced a helicopter carrying the

union agriculture minister, Sharad Pawar, to make an emergency landing
in Beed district, Maharashtra. Since the last week of February, central
India had been battered by unseasonably strong stormsthe worst in
possibly a hundred years. Hail and heavy rains had fallen across eighttenths of the districts in the state, destroying roughly 1,400,000 hectares
of crops, and killing twenty-eight people.
Pawars Nationalist Congress Party, which has ruled Maharashtra for
nearly fifteen years in an alliance with the Congress, had planned to hold
its first official campaign rally for the general elections in Beed the
following day. The event was cancelled; instead, Pawar toured stormwasted areas across the state. So did the Congress chief minister,
Prithviraj Chavan, and politicians from Maharashtras major opposition
partiesthe Bharatiya Janata Party, the Shiv Sena and the Maharashtra
Navnirman Sena. The opposition accused the ruling alliance of failing to
act quickly to address the damage, and all the leaders called for
exceptions to the election campaign code of conduct so that substantial
relief funds could be distributed directly to farmers. Pawar urged farmers
not to commit suicide as they waited for the aid. By the last week of
March, more than thirty had taken their own lives.
In Delhi on Friday the fourteenth, Pawar and Chavan met with Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh (a long-time ally of Pawars at the centre) and
members of the Election Commission to try to push through a special
relief package. The aid was needed to help farmers who had only last year
faced the worst drought in four decades; but many politicians
acknowledged that it would also benefit Maharashtras incumbent
government in the upcoming polls, in which the NCP, in a seat-sharing
agreement with the Congress, will contest from twenty-one of the states
forty-eight Lok Sabha constituencies. One NCP leader told the news
website Firstpost, There will definitely be some positive impact on the
Lok Sabha elections. So, our efforts are on to ensure that the relief to the
farmers reaches them at the earliest.
The following day, a large rally of farmers in eastern Maharashtras
Yavatmal district threatened to vote for none of the above if relief funds
did not reach them by 10 April, the first day of polling in the region. As
part of the protest, the Indo-Asian News Service reported, the farmers
performed a puja over garlanded photographs of Pawar and Chavan,
praying aloud to the almighty to give them sense and urgently guide
them to help the farming community of the state reeling under an
agrarian crisis since the past ten years. According to the leader of a
farmers rights organisation, Rs 3,000 crore in other relief funds that had
been promised in August 2013 had still not reached farmers in the area.

If the farmers feared that the state leadership, despite its high-profile
meetings in the capital, would neglect them, perhaps it was partly
because Pawar, who has held the nations agriculture portfolio for the last
decade, had been devoting attention to another powerful constituency. He
spent part of the previous month lobbying at the centre for a subsidy that
would benefit exporters of milled sugar, many of whom come from
western Maharashtra. Pawar has represented parliamentary and assembly
constituencies in the region continuously since 1967, and most of the
NCPs seats are won there.
The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairswhich includes Pawar and
the union food minister, KV Thomasmet four times to negotiate the
subsidy. Pawar, who initially had the support of the prime minister, hoped
the package would total Rs 1,400 crore; Thomas, however, wanted to
limit it to Rs 800 crore. The funds were unlikely to benefit farmers to any
great extent, since most of their annual crop had already been sold to
mills at rates that didnt reflect a bolstered export price. (At the same
time, arrears to farmers on the purchase of sugar cane had more than
tripled, to Rs 10,000 crore, in the space of four months. This was despite
the government, in December, giving sugar mills interest-free loans
totalling Rs 6,600 crore with which they were supposed to repay their
debts. Pawar had chaired the ministerial committee that proposed the
loan package.)
When the committee met on 11 February, the prime minister surprisingly
sided with Thomas; walking out of the meeting, a visibly frustrated
Pawarwho does not usually lose his coolsaid he saw no point in
attending future talks if decisions were going to take so long, according to
a Maharashtra industrialist close to Thomas. Finally, the finance minister,
P Chidambaram, who had backed Pawar throughout the process, pushed
through export incentives that were more than 95 percent of the figure
Pawar wanted. For all intents and purposes, the NCP leader had had his
way.
THE EVENTS OF FEBRUARY and early March revealed something of
Pawars outsized influencefar out of proportion to the handful of
parliamentary and assembly seats under his controlover the politics of
both Maharashtra, where he has been chief minister four times, and the
country. (In late March, the election commission allowed the centre to
pass a Rs 4000-crore relief package for storm-hit farmers.) But the fight
over the export subsidy and the response to the storm also showed Pawar
at a vulnerable moment of transition in his political journeya time when
he needs to consolidate the gains he has made during ten years of
considerable influence at the centre as part of successive United
Progressive Alliance governments, while also positioning himself to retain
as much power as he can in whatever government emerges when election
results are announced in May.
At the same time, Pawarwho was a mass leader in Maharashtras
farming cooperative movement, in the 1960s and 1970s, and a member
of one Congress faction or another until the late 1990sappears to be
losing ground with rural voters, who may increasingly sense that the

NCPs interests are not fully reconcilable with their own. In several recent
elections, the party unexpectedly lost seats in areas where it has long
been dominant.
Now, for the first time in forty-seven years, Pawar is giving up the fight
for popularly elected office; on Friday, 31 January, the Maharashtra state
assembly voted him into the Rajya Sabha unopposed. Pawar told me that
he would like younger people to come forward now. My colleagues
insisted that I come into the Rajya Sabha for the sake of the party. But
the seventy-three-year-old Pawars position in the upper house of
parliament is not a sinecure; instead, it will free him up to campaign
throughout the state and across the country, while also keeping him in
contention for the role he is said to desire mostthe prime ministership.
He has been trying for the coveted post since 1991, but has been unable
to secure it due to New Delhi politics, the Congress home minister,
Sushilkumar Shinde, who spent much of his early political career under
Pawars wing, told reporters in January. The most dramatic of Pawars
failed attempts to become prime minister led to his bitter expulsion from
the Congress in 1999. This time around, many commentators believe that
Pawar has an outsidebut very realshot at the top job.
Some people are attracted to politics by the trappings of power, but Pawar
prefers to wield it. During eight stints in parliament, he has presided over
several important ministries, including defence, agriculture and food.
There are few leaders who grasp the systemand the levers of power that
make it workas well as he does. Once he understands an issue, he
brings to it that extra something that is political, what I would call the
smell of the earth, Chandra Iyengar, a senior Maharashtra bureaucrat
who is close to Pawar and the NCP, said. He knows what will cut ice and
what will create a storm, and how to get around it. The late BJP leader
Pramod Mahajan used to say that Pawar works like a monster, and the
Indian Express recently named him the twelfth most powerful person in
the country (just below the BJP president, Rajnath Singh, but above the
BJPs leader of the opposition, Sushma Swaraj).
Recently, however, the sourcesand consequencesof Pawars influence
have come under increasing public scrutiny. In October, the Aam Aadmi
Party alleged that the NCP leader and his nephew, Maharashtras deputy
chief minister, Ajit Pawar, intentionally ran the states cooperative bank
the largest in Asiainto the ground by handing out bad loans to
prominent sugar-mill operators. The AAP also accused them of forcing the
sale of distressed sugar cooperatives to private companies at ludicrously
low rates. In December, a whistle-blower and former bureaucrat who had
implicated Ajit in a Rs 35,000-crore irrigation scam joined the AAP; then,
in February, the party alleged that Ajit was also involved in a Rs 22,000crore scam involving power distribution.
The AAPs claims, which have not been substantiated, recall a slew of
other corruption allegations against Pawarrelating, among other things,
to agricultural imports and exports, irrigation schemes, land acquisition,
cricket, the 2G cellular spectrum scam, disproportionate assets, an Enroncontrolled power plant, and the development of a private hill station

named Lavasa, outside of Pune. Many of these scandals took place after
the United Progressive Alliance, of which the NCP is a member, came to
power at the centre in 2004. One Congress member of parliament, who
was close to Pawar before Pawar left the party in 1999, told me that
Pawar plays real estate as one plays poker. His friends are business
people. There have also been unproven accusations that Pawar has links
to the underworld, including the Bombay gang leader Dawood Ibrahim.
This March, the AAP announced that a former Indian Police Service officer,
Suresh Khopade, will contest against Pawars daughter, Supriya Sule, for
the Lok Sabha seat in Baramati, in Pune district, the constituency where
Pawar has long held power. Going by the AAPs record, it is likely that
allegations of corruption and criminality against Pawar will be important
weapons in the campaign.
Though Pawar has never been officially charged with malfeasance, the
view that he is corrupt has gained significant traction in the public
imagination. In one well-known incident, in November 2011, he was
slapped across the face and denounced as a thief by a young man at a
Delhi press conference. It is difficult to imagine that the charismatic Pawar
of thirty or forty years ago would have been assaulted like that.
Whether the allegations of corruption prove true or not, they have
contributed to a sense that Pawars influence is on the decline. Even some
who believe that the Congress, despite its unpopularity in recent opinion
polls, will be in a position to lead the next government reject the
possibility of Pawar becoming prime minister. Two long-time Congress
leaders told me that, after ten years of UPA rule at the centre and fifteen
years of a joint Congress-NCP government in Maharashtra, they expect
the NCPs current tally of eight Lok Sabha seats to decrease in the coming
elections.
But other commentators caution against underestimating Pawar. What
goes for him, even if he gets only six seats, is his tremendous network,
and huge money poweryou cannot even imagine this, Kumar Ketkar,
the editor of the Marathi daily Divya Marathi and a vocal critic of the NCP
leader, said. Pawar, Ketkar continued, will not trust even his best friend,
and even his own followers do not trust him. They respect him and are
awed by him. A Maharashtra journalist who has followed Pawars career
said that other NCP leaders are afraid of Pawarthat if they leave him,
he will finish them politically. But the BJP parliamentarian Najma
Heptullah, who was a long-time member of the Congress and a Pawar
loyalist, said that the NCP leader stands by his friends. In his home state,
he still has connections in every assembly constituency; one former
Congress Rajya Sabha member said that Pawar knows political workers
inside outtheir parents, uncles, aunts, children. He gives them his
blessings and often also money to fight elections.
Pawars relationships span the political spectrum. Over the years, he is
believed to have partially funded the election campaigns of several
regional parties, and he has shown a willingness to exploit links with BJP
leaders to further his political career. In the late 1970s, he accepted the
support of the BJPs earlier avatar, the Janata Party, and became the chief

minister of Maharashtra. In 1995, there was speculation that many

independents who supported a BJPShiv Sena state government were
close to him. Though he has always put himself forward as a progressive,
secular leader, in recent weeks he vacillated between righteous
denunciation and cautious prevarication when it came to Narendra Modis
role in the Gujarat riots in 2002and then issued statements that he
wont ally with the BJPs National Democratic Alliance. (Many analysts saw
this as nothing more than an attempt to compel the Congress to let his
party contest more Lok Sabha seats.)
If Pawars previous attempts to manoeuvre himself into the prime
ministers office are any indication, however, he may never stake a public
claim to the job. Some senior politicians say that his primary concern is to
stay relevant in Maharashtra. The former general secretary of the
Communist Party of India, AB Bardhan, told me, A few months ago, I
asked him, Do you want to be a leader of Maharashtra or of India? If
the answer was Maharashtra, Bardhan told him, Pawar could not leave his
alliance with the Congress; if it was India, he had no other alternative
but to join a third-front government, led by the Left. Pawar said,
Maharashtra is my first priority. I said, This is a misfortune for us and
for you, because all of us feel you are capable.
|TWO|
MY FATHER IS WHERE HE IS BECAUSE of his own electoral merit and
not because someone likes him, Supriya Sule told me when I met her in
the central hall of Parliament House in February. The fifteenth Lok Sabha
was nearing the end of its last session, and the atmosphere was charged,
as members discussed the upcoming elections over coffee. Fellow
politicians periodically came up to Sule to wish her luck, but usually added
that she was sure to win from her fathers old constituency. Sule
continued, He is number three in the cabinet today even though he has
only eight seats in the Lok Sabha.
Perhaps the most critical period in Pawars journey to the prominence Sule
described came in the late 1990s, when he realised that he would always
hit a ceiling if he remained within the Congress. This was a particularly
turbulent time in national politics: between 1996 and 1998, there were
four different premierships. The Congress was in a state of disarray. In
1996, its tally of parliamentary seats plummeted from 232 to 140, almost
sixty seats lower than at any point since the late 1970s, at the end of the
Emergency. Many leaders began to gravitate towards other parties, and
HD Deve Gowda became prime minister at the head of a Janata Dal
government backed from outside by the Congress.
After ten months, the Congress president, Sitaram Kesri, decided to
withdraw the partys support for Deve Gowda, toppling the government.
The move infuriated fellow Congress politicians, who were wary of fighting
fresh elections. But Kesri hoped to become prime minister himself; there
were reports that he called the Indian president, Shankar Dayal Sharma,
to beg for the position. When it became clear that Sharma had no

intention of inviting Kesri to lead the government, disaffected Congress

leaders began contemplating a revolt.
At the time, Pawar, who had fought Kesri for the post of party president,
was the leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha. He had been the chief
minister of Maharashtra twice, and a Congress member of parliament on
and off since 1984. He had also served as defence minister in the PV
Narasimha Rao government in the early 1990s. Congress members of
parliament began gathering in Pawars home to discuss deposing Kesri;
around forty of them were prepared to support Pawar as party president
and prime minister. It was a matter of just passing a resolution against
Kesri, Najma Heptullah, the BJP parliamentarian and former Congress
member, told me. She said this was Pawars best chance to make it as
prime minister.
In the end, Pawar refused to battle publicly against Kesri. Many people
said that Pranab Mukherjee, then a member of the partys highest body,
the Congress Working Committee, prevailed upon Pawar not to risk the
embarrassment of possible failure. In the 1998 general electionsDeve
Gowda had been replaced by IK Gujral, whose government collapsed after
little more than a yearthe Congress, under Pawars stewardship, won
thirty-three of Maharashtras forty-eight Lok Sabha seats, but the party
lost the election nationally. When the BJP formed a coalition government
under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Mamata Banerjee, who was then a Congress
member of parliament, publicly suggested that Pawar be made the
chairman of the Congresss legislative caucus, the Congress Parliamentary
Party, and this led to his being anointed the leader of the opposition.
Vajpayees government, backed by thirteen regional parties, was a
tenuous one, and as 1998 wore on into 1999 it looked increasingly
vulnerable. The AIADMK party leader J Jayalalithaa withdrew from the
coalition that April. This was followed by a vote of confidence on the floor
of the Lok Sabha. The Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati had told
coalition heads that she would back Vajpayee, but Pawar moved to create
an opening for himself. He had networked with Mayawati, Ketkar, the
editor of Divya Marathi, said. He talked to her and, at the last moment,
she decided to vote against the Vajpayee government. It fell by one vote.
A chance to form a new government, and a path to the prime ministers
office, now seemed to open up for Pawar. But other, more important
power centres had also emerged in the Congress. In 1997, party leaders
convinced Rajivs widow, Sonia, to join the party despite her reluctance,
and, in 1998, she took the party reins.
According to Ketkar, a cold war developed between Sonia and Pawar. If
Pawar nominated one person for a post, Sonia would nominate another.
Pawar also felt humiliated by what he called other pinpricks: before the
elections, the executive group of the Congress Parliamentary Party had
been reconstituted without his consultation; delegations of Congress
members of parliament were sent abroad without his approval as the
leader of the opposition; and, in parliament, other members of the party

would freely sit in the chair reserved for the leader of the opposition,
which is supposed to be sacrosanct.
Still, Pawar believed he could count on the inexperienced Sonias support
to form the next government. He thought Sonia Gandhi would bless
him, Ketkar said. Instead, she made her own move, in April 1999. There
were MPs who told me that I should stake a claim to the prime ministers
office, Pawar told me. But Sonia Gandhi went to KR Narayananthe
presidentto say that she could rally a majority government of 272 seats
under her own leadership. When Sonia left her meeting with Narayanan
and walked through the forecourt of Rashtrapati Bhavan, she told waiting
journalists, We have 272, and more are coming.
It was then that Pawar decided that he would come out of the Congress,
Ketkar said. And that there was no possibility of him becoming prime
minister while he remained with the party.
ULTIMATELY, Sonia could not mobilise the numbers necessary to form a
government, and Narayanan called for fresh elections. Pawar flexed his
muscles within the Congress by helping to bring allies in line, and
positioned himself for another shot at the prime ministership. When the
Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad came back from seat-sharing
negotiations with an offer from the AIADMK chief, Jayalalithaa, for the
Congress to contest eight precincts in Tamil Nadu, Pawar was sent to
Chennai. He came back with a promise of fourteen. (The alliance later fell
apart, ahead of the elections.)
On his return, it was Sonia to whom Pawar had to report. I came back
and briefed Sonia-ji that morning, he said. For Pawar, who had clawed
his way into the Congresss decision-making bodies by dint of his own
political nous and hard work, the rule of an inexperienced dynast must
have been an affront. According to a Maharashtra journalist covering the
Congress at the time, the party was placing Pawars opponents in the
states district committees, and this made Pawar mad; it signalled that
he was not of any worth to the high command, and he decided not to put
up with this nonsense. He used to say, It was OK up to Jawaharlal Nehru
and Indira Gandhi, but kya sabko sashtang pranam karna parhega? (will
I have to prostrate myself before every generation?)
A bureaucrat and a politician who were both close to Pawar during this
period told me that he was mulling over the possibility of attacking Sonias
foreign origins, and had reached out to friends within the party to gauge
their reactions. According to a senior NCP leader who has been close to
several Congress prime ministers, the plan was conceived by Narasimha
Rao, who had felt humiliated by Sonia when he was heading the
government between 1991 and 1996. But the journalist Kalyani Shankar,
who has known Rao for many years, said that Rao may have been
sympathetic to the idea but there was no way that he would have
encouraged a split in the Congress. Before he flew to Chennai to meet
Jayalalithaa, Pawar summoned the party leaders PA Sangma, Tariq Anwar
and Najma Heptullah to a late-night meeting at his home in Delhi, where

they planned their rebellion.

Soon after Pawars return to Delhi, there was a sitting of the Congress
Working Committee. After some opening remarks from Sonia, Sangma
began the assault, arguing that Sonias foreign origins would become
problematic for the party. All hell broke loose, with several other leaders
shouting down the idea. The senior leaders Arjun Singh, RK Dhawan and
Ambika Soni all supported Sonia. Pawar told me he was among the last to
speak. I said I was in Bombay University and a girl student had asked
me, Cant the Congress get anyone born in India to lead it? he told me.
But I said this would not be an election issue.
Sonia, realising that a revolt was brewing, walked out. Arjun Singh rushed
after her, barefoot, to try to bring her back to the meeting, but failed. In a
sycophantic 2006 Malayalam biography of Sonia Gandhi that was recently
translated into English, the current food minister, KV Thomas, whom
Pawar fought over the sugar export subsidy, devoted a chapter titled
Backstabbing to the incident. Before leaving the meeting, Thomas
writes, Pawar, Sangma and Anwar told Pranab Mukherjee, then a senior
Congress leader, This is our last CWC.
According to Pawar, after the meeting Sangma shared with Anwar and
him a well-drafted letter addressed to the Congress president. It said that
only one born on Indian soil should lead India, and suggested that the
Congress manifesto call for an amendment to the constitution to require
that the offices of the president, vice president and prime minister be held
only by natural-born Indian citizens. Pawar, Sangma and Anwar signed
the letter, then gave it to Mukherjee. Sonia soon abdicated the party
presidency, but a mob of Congress workers gathered outside her house at
10 Janpath to demand that she withdraw her resignation. Before long, it
became clear that few Congress leaders were willing to back Pawar. His
plan had failed. I left by the evening flight for Pune, he said. The next
day they expelled usSangma, Tariq and mefrom the party, and Sonia
returned to the presidency.
ACCORDING TO THE FORMER CONGRESS MEMBER of the Rajya
Sabha with whom I spoke, Pawar used to tell his followers, If you
prostrate before the Gandhi family, they wont respect you. Apni takat
banao (Make yourselves strong). Then, the Congress leader continued,
you can hit back from a position of strength and they will give you what
you want.
This philosophy began to pay dividends almost immediately after Pawar
revolted from Sonia and formed the NCP. Pawar launched the party at a
massive rally in Shivaji Park, in Mumbai, on 10 June 1999. He told me the
crowd was 400,000 strong. As the journalist Samar Khadas put it, This is
a tradition here in Maharashtrathat whoever is against Delhi becomes
popular amongst the masses.
Together with Sangma and Anwar, Pawar began campaigning aggressively
for that Septembers elections. According to Kumar Ketkar, Pawar created

a zabardast mahaula fantastic environment: There used to be virtual

silence in the Congress office and vibrancy in the NCP office, with a large
number of young people milling around there. The Maharashtra media,
Ketkar added, was with the NCP.
The party contested 132 parliamentary precincts and 223 Maharashtra
assembly districts that year. Although the BJP and its NDA allies were able
to form the central government (riding, many thought, on the nationalistic
sentiments provoked by the NDAs successful nuclear weapons tests in
1998, and by the Kargil war with Pakistan), Pawar was able to secure
significant political power for himself in Maharashtra, where the NCP won
58 assembly seatsenough to determine which parties would form the
states ruling coalition.
Recognising Pawars leverage, Vajpayee and LK Advani offered him a
prominent position at the centre if he joined the NDA government,
according to the BJP leader Najma Heptullah. Heptullah said she
telephoned Pawar at the time and urged him not to ally with the
Congress. But a role at the centre would mean wielding far less power in
Maharashtra, where Pawar had to deliver for his base. Despite their
mutual suspicion, Pawar and Sonia Gandhi realised that without a
CongressNCP alliance, they would have to cede the state to a
predominantly BJP and Shiv Sena government. They were pragmatic
enough to let bygones be bygones.
Sonia-ji came to my house, and said, Jo ho gaya, so ho gaya (Whats
done is done). We should now work together to form a government,
Pawar said. NCP leaders discussed the alliance, he added, and came to
the conclusion that we could go with the Congress but not with the BJP.
The NCP and Congress alliance has so far ruled Maharashtra for fifteen
years.
|THREE|
PAWARS MUTINY IN 1999 was not the first time he had broken with
the Gandhi clan over its leadership of the Congress party. During three
decades as a popular leader in Maharashtra, he had developed a source of
political authority that did not emanate from the dynastyand, like other
leaders with independent followings, he was not fully trusted by the
partys high command.
Pawar had been on the wrong side of the Gandhis since at least as early
as 1969, when Indira Gandhi moved to split the Congress over the
election of the Indian president. Pawars mentor, the Maharashtra
statesman Yashwantrao Chavan, after promising to back Gandhis
nominee, came out in support of Sanjiva Reddy, who was promoted by
the Congresss anti-Gandhi faction, the Syndicate. Reddy lost, Gandhi
seceded and formed a new Congress party, and Chavan and Pawar stayed
with the old guard.
A decade later, Pawar decided it was in his own best interests to jettison

long-time allies. In 1978, he led a desertion of thirty-five legislative

assembly members from Chavans Congress party in Maharashtra, and
joined hands with the Janata Party to form a new state government; the
thirty-eight-year-old Pawar became the states youngest-ever chief
minister. One of Gandhis most powerful aides, RK Dhawan, told me that
Gandhi never forgave Chavan for turning his back on her in 1969, and
that when Pawar broke ranks with the old Congress in 1978, he was only
following his mentor.
Pawar told me that, apart from his mother, no one had influenced him
more than Chavan. Pawars parents were relatively well-off Maharashtrian
farmers who belonged to the Peasants and Workers Party, which
emphasised social reform, girls education and rationalist thinking. At the
age of nineteen, Pawar began working as a political organiser. The first
major agitation he participated in was the movement to liberate Goa from
the Portuguese, in 1966. Then I joined the Youth Congress in Pune city
and became the Maharashtra Youth Congress chief, Pawar said. I had
decided to join the Congress because of Jawaharlal Nehru and his modern
thinking, but in Maharashtra I was attracted to Chavan. He was well read
and a cultured leader, a pukka democrat, a man of character who
encouraged youngsters. In 1967, Pawar fought his first election, for the
state assembly, from Baramati. He won, and later became the general
secretary of the state Congress committee. I used to stay in the
Congress office in Dadar, Pawar continued. It was a one-room office.
That was my home. Chavan, then the union home minister, used to refer
to Pawar as his adopted son.
By abandoning Chavanand winningPawar proved his mettle, and other
Congress leaders, including Gandhi, took note. As the monsoon session
opened in July 1979, a wave of defections swept through parliament. The
ruling Janata Party coalition, after a turbulent two years in power under
Prime Minister Morarji Desai, began to collapse, and Indira Gandhi lost her
position as the leader of the opposition. By the end of the month, Desai
was forced to resign. To avoid fresh elections, president Reddy invited
Chavan, the head of an anti-Indira Congress faction that was now the
second largest party in parliament, to form a new government. With the
possibility of a premiership before him, Chavan vacillated. Chavan was
diffident, the veteran journalist Vijay Sanghvi, who covered Congress
politics in the 1970s, told me. He didnt have the confidence that he
would be able to manage the Janata Party and Congress coalition.
According to later reports, Reddy told Chavan, If I had given this chance
to Sharad Pawar, he would have not only grasped it and formed a
government, he would have proved his majority by now, and started
functioning as prime minister.
In the January 1980 general elections, Indira Gandhis Congress crushed a
fragmented opposition and was voted back into power at the centre with
over 350 seats. In February, Gandhi reached out to Pawar, who for two
years had led a stable coalition government in Maharashtra. I got a call
from Giani Zail Singh, who was the home minister at the time, to come to
Delhi immediately, Pawar said. At the airport, his secretary received me
and drove me straight to North Block. You have to meet the PM, Giani-ji

told me. Singh took him to Willingdon Crescent, where the prime minister
was staying. Gandhi told Pawar that she admired the way he ran the
government in his state, and Singh exhorted him, as a youngster, to join
their Congress faction and strengthen Gandhis hand.
Although his party had won only one Lok Sabha seat from Maharashtra,
Pawar made a pitch for a leadership role within Indiras Congress. He was
rebuffed, and returned to Bombay. I told my wife Pratibha to pack our
bags immediately, and we vacated the chief ministerial house by 4 am the
next day, Pawar said. Within hours of his return, Indira Gandhi had
imposed presidents rule in the state.
AFTER BEING SACKED BY INDIRA GANDHI, Pawar was out of power
in Maharashtra for eight years. He used much of that time to strengthen
his base in the state, and to build personal relationships with fellow
opposition leaders across the country, including Chandra Shekhar, Biju
Patnaik, Parkash Singh Badal and Jyoti Basu. Many other influential
politicians, such as AK Antony, PC Chacko, Ambika Soni, KP Unnikrishnan
and Dharam Bir Sinha, joined Pawars faction, the Congress (Socialist)
party. But the Gandhi family remained ascendant. Following the
assassination of Indira in 1984, her faction of the party, now led by Rajiv
Gandhi, won an unprecedented 404 seats in parliament, while veteran
opposition leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee were defeated. Rajiv became
prime minister.
Pawar, however, once again demonstrated the depth of his political
appeal; he won his first Lok Sabha election, from his home constituency of
Baramati, with more than 60 percent of the vote. Pawar told me, When
they called me a Maratha strongman, they were not referring to a
community to which I belong, but to the state. Still, he was hamstrung
by Rajivs supermajority in parliament, and in 1985 he decided to return
to state politics. He contested and won the Baramati constituency, and his
party secured 54 of Maharashtras 288 assembly seats; Rajivs Congress
won 161, and Pawar gave up his place in parliament to become the leader
of Maharashtras opposition.
Rajiv eventually used his strength to bring Pawar back together with his
faction of the Congress. In 1986, according to DP Tripathi, the general
secretary of the NCP, who was then an aide to Rajiv, the prime minister
was eager to use Pawars extensive support to check the advance of an
increasingly popular Shiv Sena. (Even at Indiras funeral, in 1984, Pawar
told me, Rajiv had caught hold of my hand and said, Kabhi toh miliye
meet me sometime.)
Many felt that Rajiv was being large-hearted by taking Pawar back, but
Tripathi told him he was making a mistake. Rajiv asked him to draft a
letter explaining his position. I wrote it and gave it to him personally,
Tripathi said. It was between the two of us. But the same night Pawar
had a copy of the letter in his hand. Rajiv had given it to someone to
keep, but Pawar had links in the Congress at all levels then, and he
continues to have them even now.

Tripathi and other Congress leaders argued that assimilating Pawar into
the party would cede the opposition space to the BJP and the Shiv Sena,
allowing them to gain a more secure footing in Maharashtra. That is
precisely what happened, Tripathi said. Pawar agreed: The Shiv Sena
got an impetus and youngsters started to leave us to join them. I
remember Arun Nehru opposed the merger, predicting that people would
gravitate to the Shiv Sena. He was right. Tripathi felt the move was also
a major blunder for Pawar: If he had not come in at that time, he
would have become prime minister at some point in the following years.
Instead, Pawar became Maharashtras chief minister again, in June 1988.
One day I got a call from Rajiv at 4 am, Pawar told me. He said, Come
to Delhi this morning. In Delhi, Rajiv told me, You have to lead the
government in Maharashtra. Go back tomorrow. SB Chavanwho was
chief minister at the timewill resign the day after tomorrow at 4 pm,
and the party meeting has been called and your name has been
suggested as CM. I came back and at the airport itself there was security
behind me. SB Chavan became the union finance minister, and Pawar
took over in Bombay.
In 1989, Rajiv Gandhi was voted out of office, and replaced as prime
minister by VP Singh. By the following year, he had started to develop
serious doubts about the loyalty of various chief ministers, including
Pawar, who was thought to be suspiciously intimate with Singh. The
Congress member of parliament who was close to Pawar and mentioned
his affection for real estate deals said, Congressmen told Rajiv that
Pawar was growing too big for his bootsso it was decided to remove
him.
The following year, Rajiv Gandhi asked me to organise Pawars removal
as CM, RK Dhawan told me. According to the Congress member of
parliament, the party leader GK Moopanar was dispatched to Pawar.
Moopanar told Pawar to submit a one-line resignation letter, citing health
issues. Afterwards, Pawar held a meeting with supporters. I told him
never give a one-line resignation, the member of parliament said. You
must do a proper letter and give your reasons. I worked on that letter. It
was a beautiful letter. Two days later, Rajiv asked him who had drafted
it. Rajiv let Pawar continue for a while as chief minister. Ultimately, fate
intervened, and Rajiv was assassinated on 21 May 1991.
|FOUR|
THE 1990S WERE HECTIC YEARS FOR PAWAR, as he shifted back and
forth between the chief ministers office in Bombay and various ministries
in Delhi. He made one overt bid for the premiership during this decade
against Narasimha Rao, in the elections following Rajiv Gandhis death
but backed down in exchange for the defence portfolio. For the most part,
his focus seems to have been on further solidifying his power in
Maharashtra.
Two examples of gross financial mismanagement in the state during this

period raised serious questions about how Pawar wielded his influence.
These scandals roughly corresponded to a decade-long period in which the
costs of electoral campaigning shot up dramatically; it was also a time
when Pawars growing independence from the Congress partywhich
culminated in his rebellion against Sonia Gandhi in 1999would have
made it necessary for him to develop his own flows of capital for fighting
elections.
One of the first high-profile scandals under Pawars watch involved a $3billion power plant in Dabhol, western Maharashtra, run by the American
company Enron (which went bankrupt in 2001 after the discovery that
widespread accounting fraud at the company was hiding massive debts).
A power-purchase agreement, which compelled the state to buy electricity
from Enron at extortionate rates, was negotiated in secret and signed by
the Maharashtra State Electricity Board, or MSEB, in 1993, when Pawar
was the chief minister.
When details of the agreement leaked out, the project came under intense
criticism. As an article in Economic & Political Weekly later summarised,
It was a one-sided, badly negotiated contract that contained provisions
which defied every logic: the project itself was unwarranted, the design
was sub-optimal, the choice of the fuel was wrong, the plant cost was
much higher than that of comparable plants, the equipment had technical
problems, all risks were borne by MSEB, and many financial and legal
provisions were blatantly one-sided and unjustified.
Many commentators have attributed the projects problems to political and
administrative incompetence, but Pawar is known to study a subject
deeply before taking a decision on it. A couple of years before the Enron
deal began taking shape, a state policy was drafted to reserve 30 percent
of government jobs, and 33 percent of seats in municipal bodies and
panchayati raj institutions, for women. Pawar held sixteen consultations
with various groups, according to Chandra Iyengar, the Maharashtra
bureaucrat who was close to Pawar and his government. (Pawar
succeeded in pushing the reform through, over the objections of many of
his colleagues, making him one of the first chief ministers to enact such
legislation.) This was also the case with other policies, Iyengar said;
Pawar would take his time to understand the pros and cons of an issue.
Pawars daughter, Supriya Sule, echoed this general view of her fathers
administrative acumen: No collector can bullshit him and get away. He
has made the best of the system and done development work without
blabbing about it. She added, He is an able administrator in any crisis.
He is exceptionally patient, and a good listener. And a quick decisionmaker. And completely focused. Whether it is with my daughter, or with
the prime minister, the attention is totally ours.
In the Enron case, a senior Maharashtra bureaucrat, K Padmanabhaiah,
explicitly opposed the deal, believing that it might lead to the
government of Maharashtra getting mortgaged, the former Congress
Rajya Sabha member I spoke with said. Padmanabhaiah, who was a

member of the Maharashtra IAS cadre and worked in the state for several
decades, told me, There was nothing in the deal for India, and I opposed
it. In Maharashtra, the style is that we can write on the file what we think
and the minister can overrule you.
The BJP and the Shiv Sena came to power in Maharashtra for the first
time in 1995, after campaigning heavily on allegations of corruption in the
Enron deal. During the elections, the Congress had refused to grant
tickets to many Pawar loyalists who subsequently won as independents
and gave outside support to the new government. Once in power, the BJP
and Shiv Sena, too, became advocates for the Dabhol project, and
renegotiated even worse terms for the state. Within five years, the price
of electricity from the plant had become so high that Maharashtra
defaulted on its purchasing obligations, and a judicial inquiry was mooted.
Pawar, back in power as part of a Congress-led alliance in the state,
threatened to bring down the government if the probe went forward.
By 2005, the plant was still mired in controversy, and new negotiations
were taking place at the centre. P Chidambaram, then the finance
minister, recused himself because he had previously represented Enron
before the Bombay High Court, but the negotiations included the planning
commission deputy chairman, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, who had helped
Enron overcome one of the most important statutory obstacles to the
project, and Pawar, who was then the minister for agriculture. The next
year, 83 percent of the beleaguered, debt-ridden plant was sold to three
public companiesthe National Thermal Power Corporation, Gas Authority
of India Limited, and the Maharashtra State Electricity Board, whose
chairman is Ajit Pawar.
WHILE THE ENRON DEAL WAS DEVELOPING, Sharad Pawar also
began to strengthen his hold over Maharashtras sugar production
industry and the banking sector that supports it. High liquidity and
extensive political control is widely thought to make the industry an
important source of campaign funding in states like Maharashtra, Tamil
Nadu and Uttar Pradesh. In Maharashtra, much of the money in the
industry flows into it from cooperative banks. Whats more, farmers are
obligated to sell their sugar cane to specific mills, making the companies
that own the factories important centres of local political power.
In the mid 1990s, the states sugar factories became increasingly
burdened with debt; by early 1997, only nineteen of its 116 cooperative
mills were making a profit, and the sectors accumulated losses totalled Rs
700 crore. Still, the state decided to allow new mills to enter the market.
By 2005, Maharashtra had 190 sugar plants; seventy-seven had been
shuttered, and another forty-three were in the red, according to an
analysis in Economic & Political Weekly.
As ailing mills shut down, they were frequently privatised. This process
was accelerated in 1998 by a Government of India order that opened the
sector up to unlicensed players. At the same time, farmers who found
sugar cane production to be increasingly unprofitable, and who were often

owed money by defaulting cooperative mills, were deciding in evergreater numbers to sell their property. In the past decade or so, the price
per acre of agricultural land in some parts of western Maharashtra
reportedly shot up forty or fifty times to Rs 10 lakh.
Pawar was by no means the original source of the trouble in
Maharashtras sugar industry. Sugar-producing cooperatives have been
subject to political control since their advent in the years following
Independence, and policy problems have led to massive fluctuations in the
market, and in farmers incomes, since at least as early as the 1970s. But
the decline of the mills seems to have accelerated as his political hold on
Maharashtra tightened.
In early 1999, Ajit Pawar was elected chairperson of the Maharashtra
State Cooperative Bank, which was founded in 1911 and became the apex
financial institution for all of the states cooperative lenders in 1954. At
the time Ajit took over, the MSCB reportedly had total deposits and
working capital of Rs 17,000 crore.
Throughout the next decade, the MSCB was largely controlled by the
Pawars and other NCP leaders. (Although Ajit was not always the
chairman, he continued to sit on the board.) The bank began lending
freely to distressed sugar mills; the loans were backed by guarantees that
unpaid debts would be covered by the Maharashtra government. During
this time, the bank repeatedly flouted the directives of its regulator, the
Reserve Bank of India, which had demanded that the bank reform its poor
governance and lending policies.
Finally, in 2011, the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development,
or NABARD, which among other things helps oversee the countrys
cooperative lenders, reported gross financial and administrative
irregularities at the MSCB. The RBI dissolved the MSCBs board, and took
control of the institution. According to the NABARD report, over 20
percent of its loans were not being repaid; this contributed to an annual
operating loss of more than Rs 1,000 crore. The bank scored just one
point, out of a possible forty-eight, on measures of institutional health
including income, loan worthiness, and management quality.
In addition to frivolous expensessuch as Rs 1 lakh for a custom number
plate for the banks chairman, the NCP leader Manikrao Patiland
otherwise unsound loans to NCP and Congress politicians and their family
members, around half of the MSCBs loans had been made to the states
debt-ridden sugar factories, which accounted for six out of every ten of
the banks non-performing assets. NCP and Congress politicians owned
many of the defaulting mills, whose debts ran into hundreds of crores.
|FIVE|
PERHAPS NOTHING SHOWCASES PAWARS POLITICS as well as his
old constituency, Baramati, which he represented continuously, in either
the state assembly or parliament, from 1967 to 2009 (when he won the

neighbouring Lok Sabha constituency of Madha). If the roots of Pawars

power sink deep into Maharashtras agricultural, banking and real estate
sectors, Baramatiwhere, like in other parts of the state, Pawar is known
as Sahebis its flower.
Anasuya Gargate is a housewife from a village called Atpadi, in southern
Maharashtra, who married a farmer in Baramati thirty years ago. At that
time, it was a little larger than a village, with probably no more than ten
thousand people, Gargate said. Today, as you can see, it is a thriving
town. It has grown in every areaeducation, industry, agriculture, biotechnology. You name it and you can see it here. Today, 55,000 people
live in the town.
In many ways, Baramati reflects not only Pawars direct interventions, but
also broader transformations in the countrys agricultural regions, like the
shift from farming to real estate development. These have accelerated
dramatically in the past ten years, during the time that Pawar has been
the union minister for agriculture. Although his policy-making at Krishi
Bhavan bears an uncertain relation to the scale and pace of change,
several commentators have said that the growth of agricultural production
and prices is one of the unacknowledged success stories of the UPA.
Others, however, assert that the growth in the sector has been skewed
towards those who were already better off a decade ago. As a recent
article in the Economic Times put it, the larger farmer has benefited more
than the smaller farmer, the trader more than the farmer, the powerful
more than the powerlessthe result, it seems, of increasing
consolidation, globalisation and volatility in agricultural markets.
On a wintry day in December last year, Pawar took me around Baramati
town and his many accomplishments there. While farmers in other parts
of the state continue to commit suicide because of debt, drought and
declining returns from their smallholdings, the Baramati area has a firstclass water-management system. It is famous for its drip irrigation and its
seedless grapes, including a variety called Sharad, which are exported
around the world. Its sugar and milk cooperatives, its modern industrial
units, its textile park and its educational institutions are all flourishing.
The town is one of the most industrialised in western Maharashtra. Its
hard not to take the view that every legislator should bring a similar level
of development to his or her constituency.
Pawar first took me to inspect the site where President Pranab Mukherjee
was due to inaugurate a building in three weeks time. Pawar is tall and
broad, and wore a white khadi safari suit. He went over the projects
progress bit by bit. He seemed completely conversant with the details,
and unwilling to leave any of the arrangements for the presidents visit to
his aides. Pawar is at his most comfortable in Baramati, Supriya Sule said.
He normally starts his day at 8.30 or 9 am, but in Baramati he is out by 7.
At a personal level, Pawar is a courteous man. I recalled something the
NCP general secretary, DP Tripathi, told me: Once I had gone to his
village, Kathewadi, with him and we had finished eating lunch. But Pawar

kept sitting. I finally asked, Should we not get up and wash our hands?
Pawar said he had not wanted to get up because it would have disturbed
the drivers, who were eating not far away, in the midst of their meal. This
spoke volumes to me about the man. Pawar is also socially progressive.
At the time his daughter was born, in June 1969, there was a nationwide
emphasis on family planning; Pawar publicly announced that he was
getting a vasectomy. When one of his supporters asked him who would
light his funeral pyre and perform his last rites, he replied, My daughter
will do my kiryakaram.
In Baramati, Pawar and I next accosted a group of denim-clad girls
outside the towns college of biotechnology. Over the last fifty years,
Pawar has created a network of educational institutions in the area.
Gargates children studied in an English-language school founded in
memory of Pawars mother, Sharadatai, who staunchly supported
womens education. The girls outside the college seemed confident, and
told us they were doing their masters degrees. They asked to be
photographed with Pawar.
Pawars stamp is everywhere on the town. A museum built by Pawar is
named after Appasaheb, his older brother. There is also an impressive
two-storey museum dedicated to Pawar himself. It houses photographs of
him with personalities from India and abroad, clippings about the major
events in his political journey, mementos he has been given, and
memorabilia and penshe is a connoisseur of pensthat he has collected
on his travels around the world. Pawar said his wife, Pratibha, kept these
things carefully over the years.
One of the most remarkable operations in Baramati is Dynamix Dairy, the
countrys largest milk-production and milk-products complex. Almost all of
the big multinational dairy brands, including Britannia and Nestle, use the
Dynamix facility, which also packages fruit juice for Tropicana and iced tea
for Lipton.
Dynamix Dairy reportedly buys 400,000 litres of milk every day from
Baramati Doodh Uthpadak Sangh, a dairy cooperative controlled by Ajit
Pawar. The majority stakeholder in the dairy is an American firm named
Schreiber Foods, but the operation was founded by an industrialist named
KM Goenka, whose family still owns part of it. Goenkas son Vinod is the
cofounder of Dynamix Balwa Realty, which has been implicated in the
multi-billion-dollar 2G cellular spectrum scam. In 2011, both Vinod and
his partner, Shahid Balwa, were arrested in connection with the case. In a
statement to the Central Bureau of Investigation, the corporate lobbyist
Niira Radia reportedly said that she believed Pawar was a key player in
DB Realty. (She also claimed that Pawar helped procure a 2G licence for
Swan Telecom, a subsidiary of Anil Ambanis Reliance Telecom.) KM
Goenka has denied that Pawar was involved in setting up the dairy, and
has said that Pawars family has no stake in the operation. Pawar has said
that he knows the Goenkas and has been a supporter of the dairy
operation, but has denied having any relationship with Balwa, or any
stake in DB Realty. He has also denied the allegations reportedly made by
Radia in her statement to the CBI.

Later, as Pawar and I visited other local institutions, I asked him what has
given him the greatest satisfaction in his life. He replied, Creating this.
After our day-long tour of the town, Pawar and I went to his house. I was
wilting with exhaustion, but he went on to meet a number of people who
were waiting to see him. Then he sat down to critique a documentary that
was being made about Sules achievements in the constituency, with a
view to using it in her forthcoming election campaign. At one point Pawar
told me, I come to my constituency on the last day of campaigning at 4
pmcampaigning ends at 5 pmand address a meeting. That is all I
need to do.
Baramati has grown with the growth of the Pawars, Gargate said earlier.
He may have his faults and may have done well for himself, but he has
also done well for the people of Baramati. Yogesh Jadhav, the managing
director of the Pudhari group of Marathi newspapers, once told the
journalist Sujata Anandan, When we studied history as kids, we were told
that Poona once belonged to the Peshwas. The next generation will learn
that Pune belongs to the Pawars.
SHORTLY BEFORE THE GENERAL ELECTIONS IN 2004, Pawar
discovered the recurrence of a mouth cancer he had first been treated for
in 1999. As news of his condition spread, it was accompanied by rumours
that the NCP would soon break up. Within days of his fresh diagnosis,
however, Pawar was back to electioneering, and a rally was held in
Mumbais Shanmukhanand Hall to launch the NCPs campaign. The
journalist Samar Khadas recalled, It was a Sunday and it was raining.
Pawar gave one of his best ever speeches that day. He said something to
this effect: I am hearing all kinds of newsSaheb has almost gone; he
has only a few days left. But let me tell you this: I am here, and I am
going to create leaders out of you all sitting here. I will tour through the
length and breadth of Maharashtra. He got a standing ovation.
Now, ten years later, its easy to think that Pawars star is once again in
decline. At the centre, he has continued to scrimmage with Sonia Gandhi,
and actively resisted the passage of her cherished food-security bill.
Although he was one of the very few legislators that Manmohan Singh
named in his farewell speech to parliament on 21 February, thanking him
for the growth in the countrys agricultural output, a former Congress
colleague of Pawar told me that Pawar later complained to him that
Singhs government had not done enough to highlight his achievements.
In Maharashtra, Pawar has battled with Prithviraj Chavan, the Congress
chief minister, over a range of issues, including the latters decision to
pursue a probe into the Rs 35,000-crore irrigation scam that took place
while Ajit Pawar held the states irrigation portfolio. (A report on the scam
by the state government later denied any wrongdoing on Ajits part.) And,
ever since the formation of the NCP, Pawar has insisted on fielding an NCP
candidate from Chavans constituency of Karad.
According to the Congress Rajya Sabha member with whom I spoke,
Pawar recently lamented that he no longer knows the names of NCP

workers grandchildren. At the same time, the first fissures of a succession

battle seem to be appearing in the party, with Pawar and Supriya Sule on
one side, and Ajit Pawar on the other. Sule has been a member of
parliament for two termsfirst in the Rajya Sabha, from 2006 to 2009,
and then in the Lok Sabha, after she was elected from Baramati. Ajit, the
deputy chief minister in Maharashtra, seems to have a stronger hold over
the party organisation in the state. Although Sule always refers to Ajit as
her brother, tensions have reportedly emerged over Sules political
activities in the state, including a 2011 yatra she organised to mobilise
Maharashtras women. Pawar told me in December that Ajit would
continue to focus on the state, while Sule would remain at the centre.
Supriya is not cut out for state politics, he said. Her interest is national
and international.
Its difficult to say what sort of toll Pawars periodic clashes with the
Congress leadership, and the tensions within the NCP, will take on his
political fortunes in 2014 and beyond. Money may count for more than
wholehearted support when it comes to securing, and maintaining, power;
yet, apart from his clash with the Gandhi family, the perception that
Pawar has big money may act as the greatest obstacle in his journey
towards the top. That said, for Pawar to continue having his way at the
centre, as he did with the export subsidy, it looks likely that it would have
to be at the head of a government of regional parties supported from
outside by the Congress. Moreover, given Pawars health and his age, this
election and its aftermath may well be his last chance to become the
prime minister.
Pawars ties to other regional leaders are incomparably strong. He
continues to have close links with Mamata Banerjee, and Lalu Prasad
Yadavs Rashtriya Janata Dal has given the NCP a seat to contest in Bihar.
Pawar told me he still has a good rapport with Jayalalithaa, and admires
her quick mind and her governing skill. He has also managed to thread
the needle between the YSR Congress leader, Jagan Mohan Reddy, and
the Congress party in the conflict over the creation of Telangana. In
addition, the NCP general secretary, DP Tripathi, is close with the CPM
general secretary, Prakash Karat, and has recently acted as a bridge
between the parties.
If there is a possibility to form a secular government, that possibility is of
a third-front-led government supported by the Congress, Pawar told me.
But there are many ifs and buts. He said there could be jhagras
quarrelsbetween regional satraps over the issue of leadership, and that
such a government may not last long. But the one who has the maximum
acceptability can be accepted as prime minister, he said. It wont be
numbers that matter.