Mumbai: The unease inside the Nationalist Congress Party spilled into the open on Monday, after six senior leaders travelled to Delhi to meet Union Home Minister Amit Shah without the party president in the room.
Deputy Chief Minister Sunetra Pawar has now called a meeting of NCP MLAs at her Devgiri residence in Mumbai at 7 pm on Tuesday. The party has not held such a meeting in nearly four months.
Ajit Pawar died in a plane crash near Baramati on January 28, 2026. Sunetra Pawar was sworn in as Deputy Chief Minister on January 31, becoming the first woman to hold the post in Maharashtra, and took over as party president.
The delegation that met Shah on Sunday night included working president Praful Patel, state chief Sunil Tatkare, ministers Chhagan Bhujbal and Hasan Mushrif, and leaders Dhananjay Munde and Dilip Walse Patil. Neither Sunetra Pawar nor her son, Rajya Sabha MP Parth Pawar, attended.
The party rejects the suggestion of a sidelining. Spokesperson Umesh Patil called such reports "incorrect, baseless and misleading" and said the meeting was pre-planned after Sunetra Pawar herself asked Shah to make time for a delegation. Tatkare said all leaders were united and that "discussions regarding a merger have already ended".
Two grievances sit at the centre of the dispute. The first is the finance and planning portfolio, which Ajit Pawar held and which Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis took over after his death. The NCP has repeatedly asked for it back and has not got it. The second is the way Parth Pawar is seen to be pushing decisions through his mother without consulting senior colleagues.
The immediate trigger, party sources said, was the loss of the lone Maharashtra Legislative Council seat the NCP contested, while the Sharad Pawar-led faction won two.
At a core committee meeting chaired by Sunetra Pawar on Monday morning, the party decided that a merger with the Sharad Pawar faction was off the table. Shah is understood to have urged the leaders to settle their differences internally.
Sharad Pawar faction MLA Rohit Pawar said last month that the Ajit Pawar-led party had lost influence since its leader's death, pointing to the unreturned finance portfolio as proof.
How many MLAs turn up on Tuesday evening will be read in Mumbai as the measure of Sunetra Pawar's hold on the party.