Sharad Chandra Govindrao Pawar was Minister of Consumer Affairs and Public Distribution between May 31, 2009 and January 19, 2011. He is currently India’s Agriculture Minister.
Pawar was born on December 12, 1940 in Baramati, a sugar-producing region, in Maharashtra’s Pune district. Pawar comes from a land-owning family. He is a member of the Maratha caste.
Pawar was first elected to the Maharashtra Assembly in 1967. He went onto become Maharashtra chief minister four times but never completed a full five-year term. Pawar has been elected to the Lok Sabha seven times and has been leader of the opposition once. He currently represents the Madha parliamentary constituency in the Lok Sabha.
Pawar is considered a shrewd political operative. In 1998, onion traders from Maharashtra starved New Delhi of onions, leading to a shortage. The crisis reportedly led to the ruling BJP losing the Delhi Assembly losing elections. An investigation by the central BJP government led to raids on Maharashtra warehouses, where traders where found to be hoarding onions. Pawar is rumored to have engineered the artificial shortage.
Pawar was a Congress party member till May 1999, when he formed the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), a splinter faction. NCP has been part of the two Congress-led central governments in 2004 and 2009. Though it was expected to merge with the Congress, it has so far stayed independent, a part of Pawar’s political strategy to extract more mileage, say observers.
He also has vast administrative and legislative experience. From 2004 onwards he has been a Union Minister of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs and Public Distribution with a short break in May 2009 when he was again elected and continued to hold the same portfolios. In a minor reshuffle of the Union cabinet in January 2011, he lost the Consumer Affairs and Public Distribution ministry but was given Food Processing Industries.
Pawar continues to have active business and political interests in Maharashtra. In the Congress-NCP coalition government in Maharashtra, his nephew is the deputy chief minister while his only child, Supriya Sule, is a Rajya Sabha member.
Widely respected, Pawar has never been caught in a corruption scandal though there have been many unsubstantiated allegations. He has managed to maintain a clean record despite having friends and family members with alleged wrongdoings.
In November 2011, Pawar made headlines when he was slapped by Harvinder Singh. Singh, who previously slapped former Telecom Minister Sukh Ram, became a minor Internet celebrity after the release of the Chamaat Song (Slap Song). The tune borrowed the music from a popular Tamil film song and remixed to celebrate Singh’s assault.
