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Sunetra Pawar: When the personal is political
Sunetra Pawar has been nominated to contest the Baramati Lok Sabha seat against her husband Ajit’s cousin, Supriya Sule
On March 30, as evening began to close the day in Mulshi, Sunetra Pawar, who was on the road campaigning for her husband Ajit’s Nationalist Congress Party, received news that wasn’t really news. She had been nominated to contest the Baramati Lok Sabha seat against Ajit’s cousin, Supriya Sule.
Almost anyone who tracks the ebb and flow of Maharashtra politics in general, and the Pawar clan’s internecine struggles in particular, knew this was coming. The announcement formalised the face-off – yet another contest in a familial history that’s scaffolded by palace intrigue.
Sunetra, who is 60, paused her campaign to offer customary first reactions to the assembled press corps. “I consider myself fortunate to have been nominated by the Mahayuti and thank all the leaders,” she said, as an unseasonal drizzle began to moisten the pre-summer haze. “In Baramati Lok Sabha seat, people want change.”
The battle in Baramati isn’t just political but personal too – for Sunetra, Supriya, Ajit and the greybeard who sits at the apex of their tribe, Sharad Pawar. And the change to which Sunetra alluded wasn’t just developmental, cultural, or even political – it wasn’t so much deviation from the norm as it was defeat. She had to vanquish Supriya, six years her junior.
For Sunetra, politics isn’t new – she is the sixth in her family entering the electoral race, following Sharad Pawar, Ajit Pawar, Supriya Sule, her elder son Parth, and Rohit Pawar, grand-nephew of Sharad Pawar – but the electoral race is. And she thinks she can win it.
Her familiarity with politics and the calculus that impels it, predates her entry into the Pawar household. Her brother Padamsinh Patil is a former minister, while her nephew Rana Jagjitsinha Padamsinh Patil is a BJP MLA from Osmanabad, now called Dharashiv.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, six of Sunetra’s relatives were in the fray across the state. Her son Parth had unsuccessfully contested the 2019 Lok Sabha elections from Maval. Rana Jagjitsingh Patil, Sunetra’s nephew and NCP candidate, lost to another relative, and Shiv Sena nominee, Omraje Nimbalkar. The Congress candidate from Dhule, Kunal Patil, was also her distant relative (he was defeated by the BJP nominee). In the Baramati battleground, Sunetra faced Supriya on the one hand and BJP candidate Kanchan Kul, also a relative from the maternal side, on the other.
Sunetra, affectionately called “Vahini” (sister-in-law in Marathi), is mild mannered and nothing like her husband, whose quick temper fuels his combativeness, and his troubles. They have been married for 39 years.
“Her gentle demeanour, characterised by her polite nature, goes well with both urban and rural class,” said Pradeep Garatkar, an NCP leader who had been a close associate of Sharad Pawar before shifting loyalties to Ajit. In her limited interaction with media so far, Sunetra has been cautious in answering reporters, the length of her pause reflective of the thorniness of the question.
She’s also not (yet) a political presence in the state capital. Sunetra prefers to stay at her Baramati home when she is campaigning in nearby locations or at ‘Jijai’, the Pune residence. It is here that she’s begun to amass her arsenal. Sunetra has been attending small meetings lasting about 20 minutes, where she appeals to the crowd to stay with Ajit dada, as he’s known.
It was at one such meeting in the last week of February, at Katewadi, that the news she received on March 30 took seed. It was where she betrayed the first hint of the NCP’s plan. “All of you (people) from Katewadi have showered me with affection. Now, I want to return it and for that, I hope you will give me a chance,” she declared.
Baramati, which goes to polls on May 7, has been the bastion of the Pawar clan. Supriya Sule has won three Lok Sabha elections from here since 2009, succeeding her father Sharad Pawar, who held the seat for over 30 years before passing it on to her. During the 2014 Modi wave, Sule managed to secure a win for the NCP from the constituency, albeit with a reduced margin of 69,000 votes, far less than the margin of 3 lakh votes in the 2009 Lok Sabha election.
With the party now split between him and his uncle, Ajit recognises that control over Baramati assures some command over his future. Sunetra, however, is quick to clarify that the political schism, isn’t necessarily indicative of a family riven. “I would prefer to speak about politics and development than family,” she said.
Her words grate against the actions of her tribe: most of the family has decided to side with Sharad Pawar and Supriya Sule. Sunetra’s brother-in-law Shrinivas Pawar, is one of them – he has termed Ajit “ungrateful”, to which Sunetra offered a puranic counter, by way of a forwarded social media message: “We are all with Dada. While there were many opposing Shri Krishna, he emerged victorious.”
Meanwhile, Supriya Sule and her NCP faction has attempted to frame Sunetra’s nomination as the BJP’s ploy to politically “finish off” Sharad Pawar. “The move to nominate Sunetra shows that it is not for development. It is a fight only to finish off Pawar sahib,” Sule said during a campaign speech.
The BJP has identified Baramati as one of 16 “difficult” seats in the state. It’s for this reason that senior party leaders have asked the cadre and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to work in coordination with Sunetra’s supporters.
Mindful of RSS support, Sunetra has met RSS workers and stopped by the places they revere. On Monday, she was at Warje, where she visited the home of Chittaranjan Bhagwat, an RSS old-timer. Three days before that, she was at Shivsrushti, a mega historical theme park in Pune’s Ambegaon, which is based on Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and conceptualised by Babasaheb Purandare. As the pictures of her visit to Shivsrushti went viral, many RSS supporters pledged her “full support”.
Among the institutions Sunetra represents in Baramati is a textile park, which was set up in 2008, and has 11 units producing readymade clothes. She is also a member of the Pawar family-controlled Vidya Pratisthan, which allowed her to gain entry as a member of the Senate in Savitribai Phule Pune University in 2017.
These stratagems are not new. Neither is the contest: the Battle of the Pawars is nearly as old as the tribe. But what’s new is that, despite the inevitability of age, the clan elder, who is now 83, sees this as such an existential clash that he has deemed it necessary to advance his campaign dates for daughter Supriya. He’s seen at meetings big and small, and while all of this unfolded over the last few days of campaigning in the past, Sharad Pawar has fired his first volley early in the crusade. Sunetra, for her part, is hewing to a line that her rival appears to have appropriated – one of passive aggressiveness clothed in sororal bonhomie. “Sunetra vahini is like a mother to me. I won’t say anything against her,” Supriya said on Sunday.
