Welcome to a Special edition of Powertrip, a political newsletter exclusively curated for TNM and NL subscribers by Dhanya Rajendran, Shabbir Ahmed, and Pooja Prasanna.
Ajit Pawar’s ‘accidental’ slip-up
In a recent interview with Sreenivasan Jain, Ajit Pawar casually dropped a bombshell that has Maharashtra’s political circles buzzing. He revealed that Gautam Adani, the billionaire chairman of the Adani Group, was part of backroom talks between the BJP and NCP in 2019. This sparked immediate outrage from the opposition MVA, who began demanding answers: why was Adani, of all people, involved in political deal-making?
But the devil, in this case too, is in the details. One that many people missed. Ajit also mentioned that his uncle, NCP chief Sharad Pawar, was in the very same room. And according to insiders, this wasn’t just a passing mention.
Ajit’s goal, the Congress and NCP suspects, was to let the world know that Sharad Pawar himself had been engaged in talks with the BJP. And that the defection of Ajit Pawar and other NCP leaders was at Sharad Pawar’s instruction. The twist? In trying to make his uncle’s involvement public, he unintentionally ended up dragging Adani into the spotlight, sparking a controversy that’s thrown Maharashtra politics into chaos.