In the 2009 general election, the Sharad Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) was part of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA). The Left Front, which had withdrawn support to UPA-I over the nuclear deal with the US, contested the election as a third front. Naveen Patnaik, then Odisha Chief Minister and leader of the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), was part of this Left-backed grouping.
While Pawar’s party was allied with the Congress in Maharashtra, its Odisha unit was part of the Left-BJD alliance there. Pawar was scheduled to address a rally with the Left and the BJD in Odisha but could not travel, citing a technical snag that grounded his aircraft in Nashik. He addressed the rally over the phone instead.
It was after this episode that Pranab Mukherjee, Pawar’s Cabinet colleague and a veteran Congress leader, made his now-famous observation. In an interview to a private news channel, Mukherjee said: “He [Pawar] always gives mixed signals. Although it may not be desirable, it is inevitable.” He added: “I have seen him doing it several times.”
What Mukherjee said in 2009 still holds true. Fifty-nine years into his legislative career, the Maratha strongman continues to keep his cards close to his chest, leaving both opponents and allies guessing about his next move.
The latest speculation around Pawar concerns a possible move towards the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA). His daughter and the Lok Sabha leader of his party, Supriya Sule, has categorically denied any such development. “There is no such proposal of joining the NDA. We have not received, nor given, any such proposal,” she said in Pune on July 18.
But those familiar with Pawar’s way of functioning know that such denials often hold only until events move in the direction he wants.
The story begins with the break-up of Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena. Six of its nine Lok Sabha MPs broke away and later merged their group with Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena in Parliament. This was widely seen as part of the BJP’s effort to cross the two-thirds mark of 361 seats in the Lok Sabha to pass key constitutional amendment Bills including the delimitation of Lok Sabha constituencies and, potentially, a uniform civil code.
To reach 361, the BJP needs the support of smaller parties currently in the INDIA bloc. The NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar), or NCP(SP), has eight Lok Sabha MPs. If the party joins the NDA, or even backs a particular Bill, the BJP moves a few seats closer to its target. This is the puzzle that Pawar, ever the shrewd political operator, appears content to let his rivals try to solve.
Supporting the NDA on a single Bill would be the simplest formula for both Pawar and the BJP. When reports surfaced that the NCP(SP) might back the NDA on delimitation, Sule clarified that any “proposal” would first be discussed within the party and with INDIA bloc partners. The delimitation proposal reportedly under discussion involves a blanket 50 per cent increase in Lok Sabha seats across all States. Reports from New Delhi suggest this formula could bring the Samajwadi Party (SP) on board. With a breakaway Trinamool Congress faction (now the Nationalist Citizens Party of India, or NCPI) and the SP already leaning towards support, the BJP could get the Bill through.
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But this remains a long shot for the government. In that scenario, the Uddhav Thackeray or Trinamool route is more useful for the BJP: engineering vertical splits in opposition parties. Twenty Trinamool MPs broke away from Mamata Banerjee and merged their group with the NCPI, a little-known outfit from Tripura. Uddhav Thackeray’s MPs merged with Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena. A similar split-and-merge manoeuvre involving Pawar’s party would suit the BJP just as well.
Two doors, two costs
Sensing this design, Pawar appears to have begun playing his own cards. He reportedly opened talks on two fronts, starting with the Congress. In a 2024 interview to The Indian Express, Pawar had predicted that parties born out of the Congress would eventually merge back into it. After Mamata Banerjee’s setback in the West Bengal election, speculation about splinter Congress outfits returning to the fold gained ground.
Pawar’s party has eight Lok Sabha MPs and ten MLAs in the Maharashtra Assembly. Sensing that the BJP could poach his MPs and MLAs, he reportedly saw two ways out. Merging with the Congress would keep the party intact, but Congress leadership, in the State and at the Centre, has not been especially welcoming of Pawar’s return.
Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge with Sharad Pawar at a press conference in New Delhi, August, 2025
| Photo Credit:
Sushil Kumar Verma
The Congress’s caution is not without reason. Leaders who stayed with Pawar in the hope of eventually returning to power are unlikely to remain loyal simply because his party has merged with the Congress. By 2028, ahead of crucial general elections, MPs and MLAs could begin drifting away from the Congress, denting the party’s momentum. On the other hand, those ideologically aligned with Pawar may have no option but the Congress. On balance, opening the door to Pawar does not offer the Congress much in return.
Media reports in Maharashtra suggest that leaders in Pawar’s party have also been in talks with the BJP’s State leadership. In the second week of July, Maharashtra Chief Minister and BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis said there was no room for a new partner in the Mahayuti, the BJP-led alliance in the State—a clear signal that he was not looking to expand his government’s ranks.
But there was a second, less obvious reading of Fadnavis’s statement: if Pawar’s faction were to merge with the NCP under its president, Sunetra Pawar, the possibility of the senior Pawar’s camp joining the government could open up. It was, in other words, both a closed door and a trapdoor.
A merger interrupted by tragedy
The merger of the two NCP factions was reportedly on the cards while Ajit Pawar, then Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra, was still alive. Frontline has extensively reported on this.
Sunetra Pawar, his widow, subsequently became Deputy Chief Minister and, in February, was unanimously elected the NCP’s national president. She and her elder son, Rajya Sabha MP Parth Pawar, have been firmly opposed to a merger with the NCP(SP). Praful Patel, the party’s national working president, and Sunil Tatkare, its Maharashtra unit president and a Lok Sabha MP, were also opposed to a merger while Ajit Pawar was alive, and maintained that position for several months after his death.
When Patel and Tatkare came to see that Parth Pawar’s working style differed markedly from that of Ajit or Sharad Pawar, they appear to have reconsidered their opposition. Highly placed sources in the party told Frontline that both leaders now favour a merger. In the third week of July, Patel made a pointed remark in Mumbai: “The vacuum created by the death of Ajit Pawar is not easy to fill. Our party needs some serious changes in the way it functions.” The comment was widely read as pressure on Sunetra Pawar and Parth Pawar, though mother and son continue to resist a merger.
After Fadnavis’s statement ruling out a new Mahayuti partner, merger talks were revived by senior leaders of both factions. Reports from New Delhi suggest the central BJP leadership is open to the idea of the two NCP factions reuniting and entering the NDA as one party. This is where the harder bargaining reportedly began. Sunetra Pawar wants a Union ministerial berth for her son Parth; Sule, sources say, is eyeing a significant Cabinet portfolio of her own. In Maharashtra, Jayant Patil, a senior leader from the Sharad Pawar faction who served as State Finance Minister for close to a decade between 1999 and 2008, has staked a claim to that portfolio again.
But talks have reportedly stalled over who would head a united NCP. Sunetra Pawar wants to continue as national president—a post she already holds—and is resisting any dilution of it in a merger. This is unacceptable to the Sharad Pawar camp, whose leaders want either the senior Pawar to remain national president or Sule to take on the role.
A family, and a party, split three ways
When the undivided NCP was in power in Maharashtra between 1999 and 2014, an unwritten rule governed the family’s division of labour: Ajit Pawar looked after the State unit while Sule handled Delhi. That arrangement has since collapsed. Both factions know, though, that the post of national president carries real weight in any negotiation with the BJP’s central leadership, and in the wider political manoeuvring ahead.
These calculations are now openly discussed in Maharashtra’s political circles. This is a contest not only between parties but within the Pawar family itself. Alongside Sule and Sunetra Pawar, a third figure has entered the reckoning: Rohit Pawar, grandson of Sharad Pawar’s elder brother, Appasaheb Pawar, and a two-term MLA. He is firmly in the Sharad Pawar camp and wants the party to remain in opposition, taking on the BJP-led State and Central governments more aggressively. An ambitious young leader, Rohit Pawar tours Maharashtra extensively, raising issues concerning farmers, labourers, the environment, the economy, and the State’s rural and urban governance.
NCP (SP) chief Sharad Pawar with MP Supriya Sule during the 27th foundation day of the party, in Mumbai, June, 2026.
| Photo Credit:
Shashank Parade/PTI
It is increasingly clear that if Sharad Pawar’s party joins the NDA in any form—whether by merging with the other NCP faction or independently—Rohit Pawar is unlikely to go along. He would, in all likelihood, leave the NCP(SP) for the Congress instead, a move that would send an unflattering signal about both the party and the Pawar family’s cohesion.
The politics of ambiguity
Through all these parleys, Sharad Pawar himself has stayed conspicuously silent—a silence that helps him preserve ambiguity. There is a long history of Pawar conducting politics from behind the curtain while retaining full control of events. The pre-dawn swearing-in of Ajit Pawar as Deputy Chief Minister in 2019 remains the starkest example. On that occasion, Pawar publicly disowned his nephew and ensured that the short-lived government did not survive. Years later, though, he told the media that he had known of the BJP-Ajit Pawar negotiations all along, and had even encouraged Ajit Pawar to hear the BJP out—even as he was working, at the same time, to bring Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena into an anti-BJP alliance. Episodes such as this have long complicated Pawar’s credibility, even as they have burnished his reputation for unpredictability.
This is partly why the BJP remains wary of dealing with him. He might offer verbal assurance of tactical support for a Bill and vote against the government in the same breath. Getting the two NCP factions merged, and Pawar formally inside the NDA, therefore serves the BJP’s interests rather better than leaving him outside it.
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Going openly with the BJP is not, however, a path that Pawar has historically chosen. Before the 2019 general election, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray, interviewing Pawar in Pune, asked him directly: With whom would he rather go, the BJP or the Congress? Pawar answered without hesitation: “Anytime, Congress.” His political career began in the Congress in the 1960s; he became president of the Maharashtra Youth Congress in 1962, under the mentorship of the freedom fighter and Congress leader Yashwantrao Chavan. Pawar became an MLA in 1967 and a minister of state in 1972, rising to Cabinet minister in 1974.
Within four years, at the age of 37, he became Chief Minister of Maharashtra, displacing the Vasantdada Patil government with the support of the Janata Party, formed after the fall of the Indira Gandhi government in 1977. The Jana Sangh, the political arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), was then part of the Janata Party, alongside various socialist groups. RSS volunteers such as Hashu Advani became ministers in Pawar’s government—the RSS’s first taste of power in Maharashtra. But because Advani held office as a Janata Party member, the responsibility for bringing the RSS into government did not attach itself to Pawar.
Before and after this episode, Pawar never went along with the BJP openly. He maintained tactical understandings with BJP leaders such as Pramod Mahajan and Nitin Gadkari over the decades, but there was never an open political alliance between the two. Pawar rose to prominence through a political movement rooted in secularism and inclusive politics, and enjoyed the benefits of that positioning through many years in power—even as the BJP targeted him in Maharashtra throughout this period.
The year 2014 changed Indian politics. Many leaders who had built their careers around the power Pawar wielded at the Centre subsequently joined the BJP over the following decade. The BJP successfully engineered a split in Pawar’s party in 2023 when his nephew Ajit Pawar walked out to join the NDA in Maharashtra, taking the party’s name and symbol with him.
After a heavy defeat in the 2024 Assembly election, in which his faction won only ten seats, Pawar’s political standing was severely diminished. His seniority and networks across sectors kept him relevant, but it is an open secret that several leaders in his party have begun looking beyond the NCP(SP) for their political future. In this context, with the BJP needing Lok Sabha numbers to pass key Bills, Pawar’s eight MPs are an easy target. Pawar knows this well. To avoid further erosion and irrelevance in State and national politics, he is, once again, playing his cards with care.
Part of this strategy is what Mukherjee once called “mixed signals”. Even Pawar’s own supporters would likely agree with the rest of that assessment: “Although it may not be desirable, it is inevitable.” That, for now, is where Pawar’s politics of ambiguity stands.
