Sharad Pawar

Sharad Pawar (born December 12, 1940, Baramati, India) is an Indian politician and government official, who in 1999 helped found the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and served as its president.

Early life and entry into politics

Pawar was one of 10 children born to a middle-class agricultural family in Baramati, southeast of Pune, in what is now Maharashtra state. He went to college in Pune, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in commerce. He became active in student politics while there. Pawar joined the youth wing of the Indian National Congress (Congress Party) and in 1964 became its president.

Mentored by Maharashtra senior politician Yashwantrao Chavan, Pawar was elected as a member of the Maharashtra state legislative assembly in 1967. It was the first of many elections he contested, all from the Baramati constituency. After being reelected to the assembly in 1972, he served in a number of ministry posts in the state government over the next several years.

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Chief ministership

Before the 1978 Maharashtra assembly elections, Pawar broke away from the Congress Party and helped form the Indian National Congress (Socialist), or Congress (S) Party. The new party was opposed to Indira Gandhi, who had stepped down as prime minister in 1977 and had formed the Congress (I) Party faction early in 1978. In the polling, a broad coalition of non-Congress (I) parties won a majority of seats and formed a government in the state, with Pawar as the chief minister. That government was dismissed in 1980 by the central government, after Gandhi had returned to power and to the prime minister’s office. Pawar became president of Congress-S in 1981.

In the 1984 national elections, Pawar contested and won a seat in the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the national parliament), but he resigned from it the next year to became the leader of the opposition in the Maharashtra state assembly. In 1986 Pawar merged the Congress-S with the Congress (I) Party (the “I” was dropped in 1996), in a bid to counter the political rise of the right-wing Shiv Sena party in Maharashtra. He again served as the state’s chief minister for two terms in 1988–91 and for a fourth term in 1993–95.

In 1991 Pawar was again elected to the Lok Sabha, and he served as India’s defense minister (1991–93) under Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao. However, by the 1990s Pawar’s political influence had begun to drop amid allegations of corruption and administrative lapses. Congress lost the 1995 state assembly elections to a coalition of Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Nationalist Congress Party and United Progressive Alliance

Pawar was elected to his third term in the Lok Sabha in 1996. The following year he attempted unsuccessfully to become president of Congress, losing the party’s internal poll to Sitaram Kesri. In the wake of the victory of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the 1998 national parliamentary elections, Pawar opposed the decision of Congress leaders to promote Sonia Gandhi (widow of Rajiv Gandhi) as party leader, insisting that anyone who could potentially become prime minister of India must be born in the country. In May 1999 Pawar, along with former speaker of the Lok Sabha Purno Sangma, and Tariq Anwar, left the Congress Party and formed the NCP. Later that year, however, the NCP joined forces with Congress to form a coalition government in Maharashtra after neither party had won a majority of seats in state legislative elections.

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Following the 2004 national parliamentary elections, the NCP joined the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) as a coalition partner, and Pawar was appointed minister of agriculture. The NCP remained a part of the UPA, which was again successful in the 2009 parliamentary elections. Pawar retained his post in the Agriculture Ministry in the new administration and also became minister of consumer affairs, food, and public distribution; he later switched to the ministry of food processing industries. He chose not to run in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections and was instead elected to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian parliament. Following an overwhelming BJP victory in the polls, he stepped down from his post with the rest of the ousted UPA government.

Party split

The NCP also performed poorly in the 2014 state assembly elections and the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. After the Maharashtra assembly election that year, it was part of a coalition government with the Congress and the Shiv Sena—the alliance lost power in 2022 after Shiv Sena leader Eknath Shinde formed a breakaway faction and joined the BJP-led NDA.

Pawar was reelected to the Rajya Sabha in 2020. Three years later, he steered the NCP through a political crisis when his nephew Ajit Pawar formed his own faction and claimed ownership of the party’s name and election symbol, which he was later awarded by the election commission. Ajit Pawar joined the NDA, taking several NCP legislators with him, and was sworn in as deputy chief minister of Maharashtra. The original party was renamed NCP-Sharadchandra Pawar (NCPSP). It performed poorly in the 2024 Maharashtra assembly elections, winning just 10 seats out of 288.

Controversies

Pawar’s ministerial stints were marked by several controversies. Among the accusations against him were that he was more interested in the affairs of the cricket world—he was president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India in 2005–08 and of the International Cricket Council in 2010–12—than in his government responsibilities. He was also criticized for promoting the political careers of his daughter, Supriya Sule, who served in the Rajya Sabha in 2006–09 and was elected to the Lok Sabha in 2009, and of Ajit Pawar.