Maharashtra Congress chief Nana Patole’s renewed verbal assault against his Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition allies, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Shiv Sena, has put a question mark on the three parties contesting the critical Maharashtra civic polls together.
Mr. Patole stirred the pot of controversy soon after the Congress’s Chintan Shivir at Udaipur where, by his own admission, he submitted a litany of complaints to the party high command pertaining to the NCP’s consistent ‘betrayal’ of the Congress and its alleged efforts to undermine the party in Maharashtra.
The Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Chief (MPCC) chief then sternly rebuked Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena for drawing up the three-ward system for the upcoming civic polls without allegedly consulting the Congress. Without directly naming either party, Mr. Patole censured the ‘opportunism’ of both the Sena and the Sharad Pawar-led NCP by hinting that the three-ward arrangement was calculatedly designed to benefit these parties in the high-stakes Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) election.
