NCP supremacy tussle: Sunetra Pawar caught between ‘Young Turks’ and ‘Old Guard’

Mumbai: The Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) has plunged into a quiet but fierce battle for institutional supremacy. At the absolute centre of this storm is Maharashtra’s first woman Deputy Chief Minister and newly-minted NCP National President, Sunetra Pawar. Having recently won the high-stakes Baramati Assembly bye-election to secure her legislative legitimacy, she now faces a far more complex domestic battlefield.

Party insiders confirm she is increasingly caught in a structural tug-of-war between the ambitious ‘Young Turks’ championed by her son, Rajya Sabha MP Parth Pawar and the party’s deeply-entrenched ‘Old Guard,’ led by political veterans Praful Patel and Sunil Tatkare.

The friction within the NCP erupted into public view following a series of highly scrutinised communications sent by Sunetra Pawar to the Election Commission of India (ECI).

A formal list of office-bearers in the newly-constituted national executive submitted to the ECI on April 29 this year, explicitly omitted the definitive organisational titles of Praful Patel (National Working President) and Sunil Tatkare (Maharashtra State Unit Chief).

While smaller office-bearers had their designations clearly detailed, the spaces next to the names of the two veteran leaders were left conspicuously blank.

As the letter leaked and triggered intense media speculation of a fresh vertical split, both Sunetra Pawar and party leaders including Umesh Patil rushed to downplay the issue, labelling it a “technical oversight” or “clerical mistake.”

Despite public damage control, senior sources within the party reveal that the letter was an intentional, defensive manoeuvre aggressively pushed by the faction’s younger leadership tier, notably Parth Pawar. The move was reportedly designed to halt any unauthorised constitutional changes or structural dominance by the veteran duo in the administrative vacuum left by late Ajit Pawar.

To effectively guide the NCP out of this crisis and prevent a structural meltdown, Sunetra Pawar will have to navigate three immediate, interlocking challenges including striking an equilibrium in the succession war, overcoming the diminished leverage factor and navigating the shadow of Maratha strongman and family patriarch Sharad Pawar and reunification rumours.

Sunetra Pawar’s most delicate challenge is balancing maternal and dynastic obligations with pragmatic party administration.

The ‘Young Turks’ want to quickly centralise power within the immediate family to preserve Ajit Pawar’s core legacy. However, if Sunetra Pawar sidelining veterans like Praful Patel, Sunil Tatkare, and Chhagan Bhujbal is perceived as systemic, it risks alienating the very leaders who possess the organisational machinery, corporate networks, and legal expertise necessary to keep the party afloat.

While Sunetra Pawar holds her late husband’s executive title of Deputy Chief Minister, she does not possess his unparalleled administrative leverage.

Late Dy CM and NCP chief Ajit Pawar’s authority was anchored in his control over the State Finance Ministry, which allowed him to control funding to vital rural constituencies. With that portfolio currently resting with Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, Sunetra Pawar is left managing State Excise, Sports, and Minority Development.

Lacking the financial leverage to heavily incentivise rural cooperative satraps, she faces an uphill task in retaining the loyalty of sugar cooperative directors, district cooperative bank chiefs, and Agriculture Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) heads, who may begin looking towards Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena or the Opposition MVA for political survival.

Moreover, the Opposition NCP (SP) faction, led by leaders like Rohit Pawar, has actively capitalised on this internal rift. By publicly fanning rumours that the ‘Old Guard’ is merely looking out for personal political survival at the expense of the Pawar family, the Opposition is testing the resilience of Sunetra’s cadre.

Sunetra Pawar will have to definitively assert her autonomous leadership brand to halt grassroots confusion regarding a potential, messy future reconciliation with the family patriarch.

Against this backdrop, to transition the NCP from a party managing a legacy of grief to a robust, independent political force, political analysts said that Sunetra Pawar will have to immediately convene a formal national executive meeting to officially reaffirm the roles of the Old Guard while concurrently defining clear, substantial responsibilities for the younger leadership.

Leaving designations ambiguous only invites paralysing distrust. She will have to carve out a people-centric identity of her faction.

With critical local body elections on the horizon, she must fiercely protect the party’s seat-sharing quotas against a highly assertive BJP and Shinde-led Shiv Sena, demonstrating to her MLAs that her leadership can still guarantee their electoral survival.

Sunetra Pawar’s transition from a low-profile social organiser to a frontline political chief is complete. However, her true test does not lie in beating external political opponents, but in whether she can successfully broker peace between the ambitious youth and the seasoned veterans inside her own war room.

IANS