Kolhapur: Taradgaon village in Satara’s Phaltan tehsil was cloaked in a pall of gloom as the mortal remains of Vidip Jadhav (37), a personal security officer (PSO) of deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar, were brought to his ancestral village on Wednesday night, nearly 14 hours after the air crash at Baramati.A 2009-batch police constable, Jadhav, who was also known as ‘Ajit Pawar’s shadow’, was cremated with full state honours around 11.45pm on Thursday.At the funeral, his childhood friends said they could not recall when Jadhav, lovingly known as Balu, became ‘Balasaheb’. Jadhav, who lived in Kalwa with his aged parents, wife, a nine-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter, had told his friends that he would come home to cast his vote for the upcoming zilla parishad elections.Jadhav studied till class X in his village and after class XII, he joined a preparatory academy. In 2009, he joined the Mumbai Police at just 20 years of age. Broad-built and imposing in appearance, he was selected as a PSO for a high court judge the same year. Jadhav was part of Devendra Fadnavis’s personal security team from 2014 to 2019, and thereafter served Ajit Pawar as PSO.As Jadhav would have a tight work schedule, his friends would urge him to go back to a nine-hour duty as a policeman, but he would refuse, saying he “liked to protect VIPs”.Jadhav’s friend, Harish Chavan, who works for an IT company in Hinjewadi, said: “He was a selfless person. He used to help even strangers if friends or relatives requested him to do so…sometimes he would take us to meet Ajitdada…Ajitdada was fond of him…”Jadhav’s father is a retired school employee, and his mother is a homemaker. His wife, a pharma graduate, works in a private company.
