Sanjay Gandhi To Ajit Pawar: Prominent Public Figures Who Died In Air Mishaps

Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar and four other persons were killed in an aircraft crash on Wednesday morning. The incident occurred when the plane carrying Pawar, 66, and others was trying to land in Pune's Baramati area.

The incident has brought back memories of other major air tragedies in which political heavyweights and prominent personalities lost their lives.

Contentious till date, and still lacking veracity, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was perhaps the first Indian politician who reportedly died in a plane crash on August 18, 1945 in present day Taiwan.

India's pioneering nuclear physicist Homi Jehangir Bhabha was killed in a tragic crash aboard Air India Flight 101 on January 24, 1966. The plane crashed into Mont Blanc in the Swiss Alps due to a miscommunication with the Geneva air traffic control.

Sanjay Gandhi, younger son of Indira Gandhi and Feroze Gandh and Lok Sabha MP died at the age of 34, when he crashed a two-seater aircraft he was flying, soon after taking off from the Safdarjung airport in Delhi on June 23, 1980. The plane had crashed near Teen Murti house.

Senior Congress leader Madhavrao Scindia, former civil aviation minister, died on September 30, 2001 in a plane crash while travelling to Kanpur to address a political rally. All eight people on the private aircraft were killed as the plane crashed in UP's Motta village due to poor weather. He was 56.

Sitting Lok Sabha Speaker and Telugu Desam Party leader GMC Balayogi was killed in a chopper crash on March 3, 2002, when a private helicopter carrying him from Bhimavaram in the West Godavari district crashed into a pond near Kaikalur in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh.

Industrialist and Haryana minister Om Prakash Jindal lost his life in a helicopter crash in 2005 along with Agriculture Minister Surender Singh when their chopper was en route to Chandigarh from Delhi and crashed in Uttar Pradesh's Saharanpur.

Y S Rajasekhara Reddy of undivided Andhra Pradesh and Dorjee Khandu of Arunachal Pradesh were two sitting Chief Ministers who were killed in plane crash tragedies in 2009 and 2011 respectively. Reddy died on September 2, 2009, when his helicopter crashed in the dense Nallamala forest owing to mechanical failures and inclement weather. Khandu was killed along with four others when a helicopter carrying them from Tawang to Itanagar crashed in the West Kameng district of the state on April 30, 2011.

India’s first Chief of Defence Staff, General Bipin Rawat, tragically died in a helicopter crash on December 8, 2021. The incident occurred near Coonoor in Tamil Nadu while he was en route from Sulur to Wellington.

Last year, former Gujarat Chief Minister and BJP leader Vijay Rupani was on the Air India Flight AI171 that was travelling from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International Airport in Ahmedabad to London-Gatwick in the United Kingdom on 12 June, 2025. Rupani was among the 242 killed in the tragic incident.