NCP ex-chief Sharad Pawar claimed that the central leadership of the Congress was not keen on profiting from the rising distance between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its then ally Shiv Sena forward of the 2014 Maharashtra Assembly polls. In the most recent revelation in his autobiography, the veteran chief has revealed that had the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party contested the 2014 Assembly polls collectively, they might have retained energy in Maharashtra.
“Had Congress and the NCP contested the 2014 assembly elections jointly, we could have won the state. If the political differences between BJP and Shiv Sena had widened further, some possibilities would have opened up, but the central leadership of the Congress was not keen on reaping its benefit,” he stated.
In 2014, the BJP broke off its decades-old alliance with the Shiv Sena and contested the Assembly polls on its personal. The alliance between the NCP and Congress too ended.
Pawar, who stop the Congress in 1999 over Sonia Gandhi’s Italian origin concern to kind the NCP, additionally claimed that after the debacle in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress started to suppose that it will be useful if the opposite events which shared its ideology (just like the NCP) grew weak.
Pawar, in the in the meantime, declared his unconditional help to the BJP for presidency formation. “After my assertion extending help to the BJP for the sake of political stability, we had been anticipating the Sena to take some totally different stand. But it did not occur. At the identical time, the BJP was attempting to fix fences with the Sena,” Pawar wrote. But a faction in the BJP did suppose that the celebration ought to not give a lot significance to the Shiv Sena and as a substitute take steps to widen the BJP’s base, he famous. All 4 events had reached the conclusion in 2014 that they need to contest the Assembly polls with out getting into into an alliance and assess their very own power, Pawar stated.
With PTI inputs
