Nationalist Congress Party
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A brief history
1999- 2023 July
Arjun Sengupta, July 6, 2023: The Indian Express
The Nationalist Congress Party is in disarray.
Ajit Pawar, the nephew of party patriarch Sharad Pawar, has joined hands with the ruling BJP-Shiv Sena (Shinde) coalition in Maharashtra, becoming the state’s second deputy chief minister and claiming support of the majority of the party’s 53 MLAs.
Ajit Pawar, on Wednesday (July 5), also staked claim to the NCP name and symbol, while taking repeated swipes at his 83-year-old uncle. “You are now 83… Are you going to stop someday or not?” he said.
“For Sharad Pawar, this might be the toughest moment of his political career,” veteran political analyst Suhas Palshikar wrote for The Indian Express.
We take a look at the National Congress Party: the story of its inception, its years in the UPA and its struggles since 2014.
But first, a look at Sharad Pawar’s political rise.
Prior to forming the NCP in 1999, Sharad Pawar was one of the tallest figures in the Indian National Congress.
He was born in 1940 into a family of local farmer leaders in Baramati, roughly 100 km southeast of Pune, in western Maharashtra’s sugar growing heartland. His father, Govindrao, was instrumental in setting up cooperative sugar mills in the region.
Interested in politics from a young age, Pawar joined the Congress Party’s youth wing in 1958 and by the early-to-mid 1960s, was one of the brightest young leaders of the party’s Maharashtra unit. Under the wing of Yashwantrao Chavan, former Maharashtra chief minister and the Congress’s strongest leader in Maharashtra at the time, Pawar contested – and won – his first assembly election from Baramati in 1967.
When the Congress Party split in 1969, he joined Indira Gandhi’s faction along with his mentor. Over the course of the 1970s, he would steadily grow in stature within the party, getting a cabinet post in the state in 1975.
After the Congress’s electoral loss following the Emergency, the party would split once again, with Pawar this time on the opposite side of Indira. In 1978, at the age of 37, he would become the youngest chief minister in Maharashtra’s history, leading a coalition government of Congress (U) and the Janata Party. However, this government was short-lived, with Indira Gandhi dismissing it soon after returning to power in 1980.
Pawar would return to the Congress’s fold in 1986, and over the following decade, grow into becoming one of the most influential leaders in the party.
Pawar’s fallout with the Congress and eventual formation of the NCP
Pawar would remain in the Congress till 1999, but tensions between him and the party leadership had begun to arise almost a decade prior. Rajiv Gandhi, party leader and former prime minister, was assassinated during an election rally in 1991. This left a significant leadership vacuum in the party – Rajiv was only 46 at the time, and expected to head the Congress for years to come.
After the party won the Lok Sabha elections that year, Pawar openly voiced his prime ministerial aspirations. He felt that given the overwhelming electoral success of the party in Maharashtra under his leadership, he had more than a legitimate claim to the top post. However, veteran Congressman PV Narasimha Rao was chosen instead.
In his autobiography Life on My Terms — From the Grassroots to the Corridors of Power (2015), Pawar would blame Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv’s widow, for the oversight.
“Self styled loyalists of 10 Janpath started saying in private conversations that Sharad Pawar’s election as prime minister would harm the First Family’s interest in view of his young age. ‘Woh lambi race ka ghoda hoga (He will hold the reins for a very long time),’ they argued,” Pawar wrote.
Sharad Pawar’s conflict with Sonia, however, was not the only thing that ailed the Congress in the mid-1990s. At the time, the party had ceased to be the hegemonic force it once was in Indian politics, and was riddled with infighting and factionalism. Sonia would be elected as party president in 1998, angering some veteran Congress leaders – including Pawar, who was the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha at the time.
In his autobiography, former President and veteran Congress leader, Pranab Mukherjee, pointed to a deep sense of alienation felt by Pawar within the Congress as the reason behind his eventual departure.
In May 1999, with the country heading for general elections, Pawar along with senior Congress leaders PA Sangma and Tariq Anwar, raised the issue of Sonia’s foreign origins, claiming that it would be prudent for someone else to lead the party instead. Sonia immediately offered to resign, but much to Pawar’s chagrin, received a flood of sympathy and support from within the party.
Pawar and the other rebels were expelled: Sharad Pawar’s time in Congress had come to an end, once and for all. He formed the NCP on June 10, 1999.
The UPA years – NCP’s heyday, marred with controversy
Despite the unceremonious exit from the Congress, Sharad Pawar and his nascent NCP soon allied with it, forming the government in Maharashtra in 1999. NCP leaders and fellow former Congressmen such as Ajit Pawar, Chhagan Bhujbal and Dilip Walse-Patil became ministers. The alliance would stay in power till 2014.
The NCP would also come to power at the Centre in 2004 as a part of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. Sharad Pawar would serve as the Union Minister of Agriculture under both the Manmohan Singh governments, from 2004 to 2014.
During this heyday of the NCP, when it held power both at the Centre and in Maharashtra, the party rode on the support of rural Maharashtra. Pawar, with his base in the sugar belt and history with various cooperatives, had always been an influential leader in Maharashtra’s rural belts and his party soon wrested power from the Congress in these regions.
However, the NCP’s time in power was marred by allegations of wrongdoing. Pawar was accused of corruption, first in 2007, in a multi-crore wheat procurement scam, and then in 2009, in connection to a steep rise in prices of sugar – Pawar was accused of engineering the rise to benefit hoarders and importers. He was also called out over his promotion of hazardous pesticide endosulfan as well as blamed for the rise in prices of agri products during UPA II.
Finally, a lingering criticism of Pawar was about his time as BCCI president. Critics said that he spent more time running cricket in India than doing his ministerial duties.
Since 2014: Struggles and some fundamental issues
With the Modi wave of 2014, NCP lost power both at the Centre and in Maharashtra. While it briefly provided outside support to the BJP’s minority government in the state, when estranged ally Shiv Sena decided to join the BJP, the NCP’s support became irrelevant.
In the 2019 general elections, the NCP won only 5 seats (out of the 34 seats NCP contested in a total of 48 Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra). However, it performed well in the Assembly polls, with septuagenarian Sharad Pawar leading the charge. The BJP-Shiv Sena alliance fell short of a majority, and after some drama, the NCP came back to power in Maharashtra in 2019, this time, a part of a three-party alliance between the NCP, the Congress, and the Shiv Sena.
This Maha Vikas Aghadi government, however, fell in about three years in 2022, when a faction of Shiv Sena MLAs led by Eknath Shinde rebelled and allied with the BJP to help the party return to power in Maharashtra. Since then, the NCP has sat in opposition – until now.
One of the reasons behind the party’s struggles since 2014 has been its inability to spread its reach beyond its rural strongholds, especially in western Maharashtra. Pawar has himself acknowledged this multiple times in the past few years.
“We need to expand the party’s organisation in Mumbai and other urban areas. The NCP is perceived as a party with rural backing. While there is nothing wrong with that, one must be mindful of the rising pace of urbanisation across the state. Today, 50 per cent of Maharashtra is urban. We must be seen taking up issues concerning urbanisation and fight for the cause of the urban local,” Pawar said during the party’s 20th anniversary celebration, in 2019.
At a larger level, the party, which enjoyed the fruits of being in power for much of its first decade and a half, has struggled to be an effective opposition voice.
“Since the party’s inception in 1999, the NCP has been a vehicle for exercising formal governmental power for its top leaders. Most of them have spent their early years close to centres of power and do not have the stamina to work as members of an Opposition party — they are clueless about oppositional mobilisation. Since 2014, most of them have been listless like fish out of water,” Suhas Palshikar wrote for The Indian Express.
In April, the NCP lost its national party status. Next month,
Pawar stepped down from party presidentship, only to return soon after, heeding pleas from party leaders. With a faction of the NCP now joining the BJP-Shiv Sena government, time will tell whether Sharad Pawar comes out on top.
2017
Losing relevance in urban Maharashtra
Flip-flops by bosses, no clear agenda, and leaders switching allegiance to rivals have led to NCP facing existential crisis.
While nobody expected the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) to challenge the BJP or the Shiv Sena in the recently held Mira-Bhayandar civic polls, the party, founded by Sharad Pawar in the summer of 1999, failing to win even a single seat raises serious questions about its future, at least in urban Maharashtra.
What the drubbing in the Mira-Bhayandar Municipal Corporation - where it held 27 of the 95 seats - proves beyond doubt is, the NCP can only win elections in areas where its local satraps hold sway. In Mira-Bhayandar, a disgruntled local leader, Gilbert Mendonca, switched over to the Sena just before the polls.
Three months ago, the NCP managed to win just two seats out of 79 in the newly created Panvel Municipal Corporation, even as the party has been ruling the neighbouring Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation for more than two decades now, largely because veteran leader Ganesh Naik's clout remains unchallenged there.
The party's decline in urban Maharashtra after the Congress-NCP combine lost control of the state in 2014 can be seen in these statistics:
Since 2015, there have been 22 municipal elections in the state, and except in Navi Mumbai, Malegaon, and Thane, the NCP's seats have declined substantially.
In the BMC, the party won 13 seats in 2012, but managed to win only nine in the 2017 elections.
In the Pune Municipal Corporation, its share fell from 51 seats in 2012 to 34 in 2017.
In the Nashik Municipal Corporation, the party now has just five seats out of 20 it had won in 2012, and in Pimpri-Chinchwad, it has 36 seats compared to 83 it had won in 2012. In municipal corporation elections held between 2009 and 2013, the party had won 554 seats out of a total 2,543 contested, but post-2015, the party has managed to win just 253 seats out of 2,171 contested.
Now look at the pattern of these reverses: In Pune, an influential party leader and Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Kakade, a close associate of Ajit Pawar, ditched the NCP in favour of the BJP. In Pimpri-Chinchwad, the NCP's strongest leader, MLA Laxman Jagtap, had joined the BJP before the 2014 Assembly elections in Maharashtra.
It doesn't help the NCP's cause that its founder has no fixed political ideology. The NCP was carved out of Pawar's rebellion against "foreigner" Sonia Gandhi, but in a matter of months, he became Sonia's staunchest ally. And nobody has forgotten the haste with which the NCP offered support to Devendra Fadnavis's government in the state before Sena eventually came around.
"The Marathas and the minorities in Maharashtra don't trust the NCP because nobody is sure what the party stands for," a political observer said. Pawar's daughter and heir apparent Supriya Sule blamed the recent reverses on "anti-incumbency". Sule, an MP from the Pawars' bastion Baramati, said, "We were in power for 15 years. There is no other factor than antiincumbency, and unlike some others, we don't resort to jhumla."
Regarding drubbings in the municipal corporation polls, she said, "Nobody asked us about our strategy when we were winning one election after another. This just shows you have a lot of expectations from us." Political observers, however, say the NCP leaders need to see the writing on the wall, or the clock, its election symbol. Prof Prakash Pawar, who teaches political science at Kolhapur's Shiva-ji University, said: "The NCP was represented in the urban areas largely by farmers whose lands turned into gold mine due to rapid urbanisation and other interests in the real estate sector. With the rise of the BJP, these local satraps have switched allegiance." Political analyst Prakash Akolkar is of the view that lack of clear policies is hurting the party. "The Gujarat Rajya Sabha elections is a classic example, wherein one of its MLAs voted for Ahmad Patel and another for the BJP candidate," Akolkar said.
