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Watch Mr Sujit Nair narrate NCP founder and former Maharashtra CM Sharad Pawar’s life story. He was born in 1940 into a family of local farmer leaders in Baramati, approximately 100 km southeast of Pune, in the sugar-growing heartland of western Maharashtra. His father, Govindrao, played a crucial role in establishing cooperative sugar mills in the region. Showing an early interest in politics, Pawar joined the youth wing of the Congress Party in 1958. By the early-to-mid 1960s, he emerged as one of the brightest young leaders in the party’s Maharashtra unit. Under the guidance of Yashwantrao Chavan, the former Chief Minister of Maharashtra and the Congress’s influential leader in the state, Pawar contested and won his first assembly election from Baramati in 1967. During the Congress Party’s split in 1969, he aligned himself with Indira Gandhi’s faction, along with his mentor. Throughout the 1970s, Pawar steadily gained prominence within the party and secured a cabinet position in the state in 1975. Following the Congress’s electoral defeat after the Emergency, the party split once again, with Pawar this time on the opposite side of Indira. At the age of 37, he became the youngest Chief Minister in Maharashtra’s history in 1978, leading a coalition government of Congress (U) and the Janata Party. However, his tenure was short-lived, as Indira Gandhi dismissed the government soon after regaining power in 1980. Pawar returned to the Congress fold in 1986 and, over the next decade, emerged as one of the party’s most influential leaders. Pawar’s Fallout with the Congress and Formation of the NCP: While Pawar remained in the Congress until 1999, tensions between him and the party leadership had been building for almost a decade. The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, party leader and former Prime Minister, during an election rally in 1991 created a significant leadership vacuum within the party. Pawar openly expressed his aspirations to become the Prime Minister, considering the overwhelming electoral success of the party in Maharashtra under his leadership. However, veteran Congressman PV Narasimha Rao was chosen instead. In his autobiography “”Life on My Terms — From the Grassroots to the Corridors of Power”” (2015), Pawar attributed the oversight to Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv’s widow. “”Self-styled loyalists of 10 Janpath started saying in private conversations that Sharad Pawar’s election as Prime Minister would harm the First Family’s interest in view of his young age. ‘Woh lambi race ka ghoda hoga (He will hold the reins for a very long time),’ they argued,”” Pawar wrote. Pawar’s conflict with Sonia, however, was not the sole issue plaguing the Congress in the mid-1990s. At the time, the party had lost its hegemonic position in Indian politics and was plagued by internal conflicts and factionalism. Sonia was elected as party president in 1998, which angered some veteran Congress leaders, including Pawar, who was the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha at the time. In his autobiography, former President and veteran Congress leader Pranab Mukherjee pointed out the deep sense of alienation felt by Pawar within the Congress as the reason behind his eventual departure. In May 1999, as the country approached general elections, Pawar, along with senior Congress leaders PA Sangma and Tariq Anwar, raised concerns about Sonia’s foreign origins, suggesting that it would be prudent for someone else to lead the party. Sonia immediately offered to resign, but to Pawar’s dismay, she received an outpouring of sympathy and support from within the party.
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