Senior Congress leader and socialist thinker Ratnakar Mahajan died in Pune early Saturday at the age of 80, bringing an end to a political career that spanned the Emergency, the Janata movement, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party. His family said Mahajan breathed his last late on Friday, with his final rites scheduled to be held at the Vaikunth crematorium in Pune on Saturday afternoon.

Mahajan was among Maharashtra’s prominent socialist voices and had remained active in public life for several decades. He was imprisoned during the Emergency and later held several important responsibilities in public administration and politics. He served as executive chairman of the Maharashtra State Planning Board and subsequently took on organisational roles in the Congress, including senior spokesperson and vice-president of the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee.

One of the defining episodes of his later political career came in 2010, when Mahajan was a senior leader of the Sharad Pawar-led NCP. He wrote an open letter suggesting that the party should merge with the Congress, arguing that the circumstances that had led to the NCP’s formation in 1999 no longer existed. He questioned the need for two separate parties when both were jointly running the Maharashtra government.

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The proposal triggered strong reactions within the NCP and eventually resulted in Mahajan’s resignation from the party. He maintained that the Congress had played a central role in India’s freedom struggle and that there was no longer any substantial ideological difference between the Congress and NCP to justify their separate existence. His position reflected his long-standing political belief in broader unity among parties with similar ideological foundations.

Mahajan’s own political journey mirrored the shifting alliances of Maharashtra politics. He joined the Congress from the Janata Dal fold in the early 1990s along with Babanrao Pachpute, left the Congress in 1999 and remained with the NCP for more than a decade. Following his differences over the merger proposal, he returned to the Congress and once again became one of its prominent public voices in the state.

Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee president Harshwardhan Sapkal condoled Mahajan’s death, describing him as a thinker whose commitment to society and ideological guidance had left a lasting impact. Sapkal said Mahajan’s demise was a major loss to Maharashtra’s social, political and ideological spheres, praising the depth of his thoughts and his dedication to public life.

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