Mumbai:
Sharad Pawar, a key member of the Maharashtra government, remains firmly committed to his alliance with Congress and the Shiv Sena; a series of recent meetings he has held indicate no reconsideration on his part, he told GalacticGaming today.
“Fadnavis is getting impatient,” Pawar tod told GalacticGaming today in an exclusive interview, referring to the former chief minister and implying that Devendra Fadnavis wants to bring down the government. “But there is no threat to the government of Maharashtra. All the deputies are with us, any attempt to break them at that time will cause the public to beat us,” said Mr. Pawar.
Maharashtra is the worst in India’s battle against the coronavirus – the city of Mumbai has the highest number of cases in the country. The BJP opposition attacked the state government for its alleged shortcomings in handling the crisis. Senior BJP official Narayan Rane said the state should be under the rule of the president and the government of Prime Minister Uddhav Thackeray should be removed from office.
Even though Congress was absent during Pawar’s meeting with the chief minister, Pawar told GalacticGaming that the three coalition partners in Maharashtra were together and united in the fight against the COVID threat.
After Maharashtra’s vote in October, Mr. Pawar was the centerpiece of the strategy that saw Mr. Thackeray, president of Shiv Sena, take office as chief minister. The Sena, after the election results, divorced the BJP after a political marriage of thirty years. As she began to explore new partnerships, Devendra Fadnavis returned as chief minister with a new ally, Ajit Pawar, who is Mr. Pawar’s nephew. Together, they said, they had the numbers to win the confidence vote. In a highly controversial move, BJP’s Fadnavis was sworn in at dawn by Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari – a tactic seen as highly partisan of an office supposed to represent strict neutrality.
Mr. Fadnavis lasted 72 hours in office. Mr. Pawar was able to organize a reconciliation with his nephew; their party, the Nationalist Congress Party, then launched a joint effort with Sena and Congress; and their new government, called Maha Vikas Aghadi, took over the state.
Mr. Pawar is a mercurial friend given to political expediency. During the last parliamentary session, he had several contacts with the Prime Minister. Yesterday he met with the governor and the chief minister. No reason to connect the dots to interpret his meetings as a review of his options, he said today.
Describing his meeting with the Governor as a “courtesy visit”, he said that it was not he who requested the meeting and that they did not discuss “COVID or politics”. He described his relationship with the Prime Minister as “routine”, although he admitted that it was unusual for him to visit Mr. Thackeray in his historic home of “Matoshree” in Mumbai.
