Stressing that his Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) faction had not allied with the ruling BJP and the Shiv Sena coalition led by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde for “selfish reasons”, Deputy Chief Minister and rebel NCP leader Ajit Pawar on Sunday reiterated that almost every legislator within the undivided NCP had wanted to join the BJP-Shinde government soon after the collapse of the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) last year.
Mr. Pawar’s NCP faction staged a massive show of strength in the ‘sugar belt’ district of Kolhapur on Sunday evening, where Mr. Pawar addressed a public rally in which he criticised his uncle Sharad Pawar for not allying with the BJP-Shinde government sooner.
Without taking his uncle’s name, Mr. Pawar said: “Soon after Uddhav Thackeray’s government had fallen [June 2022], all NCP MLAs, barring one or two legislators, had submitted a letter to our party leader [Sharad Pawar] expressing their wish to join the ‘Mahayuti’ [Shinde-BJP] government.”
