NEW DELHI: Supriya Sule, MP and cousin of Maharashtra deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar, broke down in tears on Wednesday as she met family members in Baramati after the NCP leader’s death in a plane crash.Visuals from the Pawar family’s Baramati home showed Sule and wife Sunetra overwhelmed with emotion as they consoled relatives following their arrival from Delhi. Sharad Pawar also arrived in Baramati shortly.
Ajit Pawar (66), a six-time deputy chief minister and one of Maharashtra’s most influential leaders, was killed along with others when his chartered aircraft, which was attempting to land, crashed near Baramati airport on Wednesday morning.Pawar was travelling from Mumbai to Baramati, Sule’s parliamentary constituency and the Pawar family’s political stronghold, to address four rallies for the February 5 zilla parishad elections. The crash occurred around 8.50 am, officials said.Sule cried inconsolably for her ‘dada’ as condolences poured in from across the political spectrum. The grief in Baramati stood in sharp contrast to the political rupture witnessed within the family in 2023, when Ajit Pawar led a major split in the NCP and walked away from NCP founder and patriarch Sharad Pawar, joining the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance government. The split turned Maharashtra’s first family of cooperative-era politics into a public spectacle and set the stage for a bitter contest between the two NCP factions: one led by Sharad Pawar and the other by Ajit Pawar.At the time, critics had suggested the rift was also linked to shifting succession dynamics within the party, pointing to the rise of Sule, Sharad Pawar’s daughter and the national face of the organisation, as a key factor.Despite the open political conflict, Sule repeatedly maintained that there were no personal differences with Ajit Pawar.”Relationships shouldn’t come in between politics,” she had said, asserting that the contest was ideological, not personal.However, the bitterness of the split spilled into Parliament in September 2023, when Sule, while speaking on the Nari Shakti Vandan ordinance in Lok Sabha, took a pointed jibe that was widely interpreted as being aimed at her cousin.”Not every house has a brother who likes the sister’s well-being,” she had said, responding to Union home minister Amit Shah’s remarks that every house has a brother who strives for the welfare of sisters. Though she did not name Ajit Pawar, the comment drew immediate attention in Maharashtra’s political circles, with speculation that it reflected family tensions after the NCP split.Even after the jibe, Sule later insisted her remarks were not personal and that the family remained intact.The party was still split in two parts. In recent months, as local body polls approached, signs emerged that the two NCP factions were keeping channels open. In December 2025, Sule said her party was in talks with Ajit Pawar’s camp and that senior leaders had spoken to each other.The political pragmatism was visible in recent civic contests in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad, where the two NCP factions were seen aligning tactically to avoid a split in traditional Pawar support bases.For years, Supriya Sule and Ajit Pawar represented two different but complementary strands of Pawar politics: Sule as the measured national voice of the party in Parliament, and Ajit Pawar as the hard-driving rural organiser and administrator who built his strength in the cooperative belt.Ajit Pawar’s death now raises immediate questions over the future of his NCP faction and its relationship with Sharad Pawar’s group, with political circles already buzzing about whether the tragedy may accelerate a possible merger between the two outfits.For the Pawar family, however, the moment has collapsed politics into mourning.Meanwhile, CM Devendra Fadanvis announced a state holiday and three days of mourning. His last rites will be held on Thursday. Go to Source
