Ajit Pawar

Ajit Anantrao Pawar (Marathi pronunciation: [əd͡ʒit̪ pəʋaːɾ]; born 22 July 1959) is an Indian politician serving as the 8th Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra along with Eknath Shinde under Devendra Fadnavis since December 2024. He is the longest serving Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra non-consecutively. He has served in this position for 6 terms within various governments. He has worked as deputy chief minister in the cabinets of Prithviraj Chavan, Devendra Fadnavis, Uddhav Thackeray and Eknath Shinde.

He served as the Leader of the Opposition in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly from 2022 to 2023 and represented Baramati Lok Sabha constituency in 1991. He served as deputy chief minister many times.

Pawar was born in Deolali Pravara, Ahmednagar district. He is son of Ashatai Pawar and Anantrao Pawar, the brother of Sharad Pawar, the president of the Nationalist Congress Party and a four-time former Chief Minister of Maharashtra. He did his schooling from Deolali Pravara but dropped out of college to help his family after the death of his father.

Following the footsteps of his uncle Sharad Pawar in Indian National Congress, Ajit made his first foray into politics in 1982 when he was elected to the board of a cooperative sugar factory. In 1991, he was elected as the chairman of the Pune District Central Cooperative Bank and remained in the post for the next 16 years.

He was also elected to the Lok Sabha for the first time in 1991 from the Baramati Parliamentary constituency. He later vacated the seat for his uncle, who then became the Defence Minister in Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao's government.

Later, he was elected seven times to the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly from the Baramati Assembly constituency. He first won in the 1991 by election and retained it for five consecutive terms in 1995, 1999, 2004, 2009, and 2014. He served as the Minister of State for Agriculture and Power in CM Sudhakarrao Naik's government from 1991 to 1992.

He became the Minister of State for Soil Conservation, Power and Planning in 1992 when Sharad Pawar became the Chief Minister. In 1999, as part of the INC-NCP coalition government, he became a Cabinet Minister responsible for the Irrigation Department. He was additionally given the Rural Development Department in 2003 as part of Sushilkumar Shinde's cabinet. After the INC-NCP coalition won in the 2004 Assembly elections, he retained the Water Resources Ministry in Deshmukh's and later Ashok Chavan's cabinets.

On 23 November 2019, he defected from NCP and joined a government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party and became the Deputy Chief Minister. He submitted a paper with the signatures of NCP's MLAs to the Governor to prove the government's majority. However, the government collapsed less than 80 hours later and he resigned along with then-CM Devendra Fadnavis. He subsequently returned to the NCP, and on 1 December 2019, it was announced that he would take over as Deputy CM for the Maha Vikas Aghadi government after the start of the winter session of the state legislature on 16 December.