In a tragic incident, Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar died in a plane crash in Baramati on Wednesday morning. The incident occurred when the plane was attempting to land. According to DGCA, five people, including the crew, on board the chartered plane flying from Mumbai, Maharashtra, to Baramati died after a crash-landing at 8.45 am this morning. The crash landing of the Mumbai-Baramati charter plane occurred at the runway threshold in Baramati. Pawar was onboard along with 2 more personnel (1 PSO and 1 attendent) and 2 crew members. Further details about the crash are awaited.
Pawar was headed to Baramati to attend a public rally for the Zilla Parishad Elections. Pawar was in Mumbai on Tuesday, where he attended a meeting of the Maharashtra Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure, chaired by CM Devendra Fadnavis. Maharashtra Minister Chandrashekhar Bawankule and other officials were also present.
Who was Ajit Pawar?
Ajit Pawar was the longest-serving Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra non-consecutively. He served in the position for six terms within various governments. He had worked as deputy chief minister in the cabinets of Prithviraj Chavan, Devendra Fadnavis, Uddhav Thackeray and Eknath Shinde. He is married to Sunetra Pawar, with whom he has two sons, Jay and Parth Pawar. In 1982, Ajit Pawar began his political career after being elected to the board of a cooperative sugar factory.
In 1991, he was elected as the chairman of the Pune District Central Cooperative Bank. He was elected to the Lok Sabha for the first time in 1991 from the Baramati Parliamentary constituency and later vacated the seat for his uncle Sharad Pawar. He was elected to the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly seven times from the Baramati Assembly constituency. He first won in a 1991 by-election and subsequently in 1995, 1999, 2004, 2009, and 2014.
In November 2019, he engineered a split in the NCP and joined a government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party and became the Deputy Chief Minister. In February 2024, the Election Commission awarded the party name and symbol to the faction headed by Ajit Pawar.
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