Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar's plane crash-lands in Baramati, NCP leader passes away
Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar and five other persons died after an aircraft carrying them crashed in Pune district on Wednesday morning
A charter plane flying from Mumbai to Baramati crash-landed at 8:45 a.m. in Baramati, Maharashtra, with Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar on board, ANI reported. DGCA has confirmed that the NCP leader has tragically passed away in the fatal incident.
The incident occurred when the plane carrying NCP leader Pawar (66) and others was landing in Pune's Baramati area, officials said.
Footage from the scene shows the plane’s mangled wreckage, with ambulances rushing the injured to nearby hospitals. Details on what caused the emergency landing attempt are still awaited.
Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar was travelling to Baramati to address a public rally linked to the Zilla Parishad elections when the aircraft carrying him crashed, officials said.
Pawar had been in Mumbai on Tuesday, where he attended a meeting of the Maharashtra Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure chaired by Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis. Maharashtra minister Chandrashekhar Bawankule and senior officials were also present at the meeting.
According to official information, there were five people on board the Learjet 45 aircraft at the time of the accident. These included Pawar, two accompanying personnel — a personal security officer and an attendant — and two crew members comprising the pilot-in-command and the first officer.
Pawar was the longest-serving Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra in non-consecutive terms, having held the office six times under different administrations. He served as deputy chief minister in governments led by Prithviraj Chavan, Devendra Fadnavis, Uddhav Thackeray and Eknath Shinde, reflecting his enduring influence across shifting political alignments in the state.
He is survived by his wife, Sunetra Pawar, and their two sons, Jay and Parth Pawar.
Pawar began his political career in 1982 after being elected to the board of a cooperative sugar factory. In 1991, he rose to prominence at the district level when he was elected chairman of the Pune District Central Cooperative Bank.
The same year, he entered national politics after being elected to the Lok Sabha from the Baramati parliamentary constituency, a seat he later vacated in favour of his uncle Sharad Pawar. Ajit Pawar subsequently established himself as a dominant figure in state politics, winning election to the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly seven times from the Baramati Assembly constituency — first in a 1991 by-election and later in 1995, 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014.
In November 2019, Pawar triggered a major political upheaval by engineering a split within the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and briefly aligning with the Bharatiya Janata Party to form a government, in which he assumed the role of Deputy Chief Minister. In February 2024, the Election Commission of India formally awarded the NCP name and symbol to the faction led by Ajit Pawar, cementing his control over the party’s official identity.