Sharad Pawar bets on loyalty as defectors circle his remaining NCP camp

As whispers of a fresh exodus rattle the NCP (SP), the veteran leader insists his flock is holding firm against the pressures of political realignment.

The air in Delhi’s political circles is thick with the kind of talk that usually precedes a collapse. This time, the target is the Nationalist Congress Party (SP) of Sharad Pawar. When NCP MLA Dharmarao Atram suggested recently that five of the party’s eight MPs were preparing to jump ship to the Ajit Pawar faction by December, he wasn’t just throwing a stone into the pond; he was testing the structural integrity of what remains of the original party.

Sharad Pawar, never one to be easily ruffled by the arithmetic of defection, offered a sharp rebuttal. "None of our MPs will split," he asserted, brushing aside the claim that his party is on the verge of splintering. For a leader who watched his nephew, Ajit Pawar, walk away with 40 of his 55 MLAs in 2023, these are high-stakes claims. Pawar’s daughter and Baramati MP, Supriya Sule, echoed this defiance, challenging Atram to name the supposed turncoats. "If he has a list, he should disclose the names," she said, before adding a pointed barb: "Why is he sparing me?"

The math of survival

The vulnerability of the NCP (SP) is rooted in plain, cold arithmetic. With only 8 MPs and 10 MLAs currently in his camp, the party sits dangerously close to the thresholds governed by the Anti-defection Act. The law, which is meant to act as a shield, ironically provides a clear exit route: if two-thirds of a party's legislative contingent defects, the anti-defection provisions effectively vanish. To trigger a legally viable split, six of Pawar’s eight MPs or seven of his ten MLAs would need to move in unison.

The strategy of "poaching by numbers" has already hollowed out other regional players, most notably the Shiv Sena (UBT) and the Trinamool Congress. In those instances, the rebels perfected the art of the two-thirds split, rendering the Anti-defection Act toothless. Sharad Pawar is acutely aware that he is operating in a landscape where the traditional guardrails of party loyalty are being systematically dismantled by tactical defections.

Why it matters

The bigger picture here is the steady erosion of the political identity that Pawar built over decades. The 2023 split wasn't just a loss of numbers; it was a loss of the party symbol and the legal claim to the NCP’s legacy. While 2024 saw brief, flickering hopes of a reconciliation between the uncle and nephew, those talks reached a dead end.

For the BJP-led alliance, the objective is clear: to ensure that the NCP (SP) is whittled down to a point of irrelevance before the next major electoral cycle. If Pawar cannot keep his small, tight-knit group of MPs united, he risks losing the last remnants of his organizational leverage in Maharashtra. The battle for the party is no longer just about ideology or policy; it is a clinical exercise in managing defections and surviving the slow attrition of the parliamentary numbers game.