Pawar Reunion Exposes The Politics Of Compulsion In Maharashtra |
As 2025 comes to an end and 2026 is round the corner, it's time to take stock of what all happened in the past year. One big highlight of the year was that Maharashtra witnessed highly dramatic and unpredictable events, which may be recorded as historic in any political analyst's book.
Less than a week after the Thackeray cousins announced their "Reunion and Alliance" for the upcoming civic polls in the state, the NCP founder, Sharad Pawar, and nephew, Ajit Pawar, made it clear that they too will fight the Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad municipal polls together. This shows how shifting loyalties and political opportunism have been the flavour of the season this past year among Maharashtra's politicians!
Just about a week ago, in this very column, the FPJ predicted that the Pawar uncle and nephew duo were planning to form an alliance, meaning that the two Nationalist Congress Party fractions, which fought the Lok Sabha assembly as well as the city council polls against each other, will now be a united force in their political bastion of Pune district.
The biggest casualty of all this is, obviously, the grassroots-level activists of both factions of the NCP, who have to suddenly follow the instructions from the top and change their........