Once Sharad Pawar enters the ring, rebels will be shown their place: Jayant Patil

Once Nationalist Congress Party founder-President Sharad Pawar steps into the field, the rebels who broke away on Sunday won’t know what has hit them, party state chief Jayant Patil warned on Wednesday.“A small trailer of this was already shown to the people of the state earlier this week in Kolhapur and Pune… They are forgetting that the ordinary workers of the NCP are still with Saheb. Whatever Pawar Saheb says is the final word for us,” he said. Slamming the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Patil said that it is indulging in the politics of stealing and splitting parties in the state and elsewhere for their own benefit. “When they don’t like the questions or issues we raise, then they rob us and break us. First they did it with the Shiv Sena (of ex-CM Uddhav Thackeray), now it's happening to the NCP,” he said. Training guns on the rebels led by Pawar's nephen Ajit Pawar who has quit the NCP to join the ruling Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party government, Patil demanded how they could join hands with those who had insulted icons like Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, Mahatma Jyotirao Phule, Dr BR Ambedkar, and other.

The Sharad Pawar and Ajit Pawar factions of the Nationalist Congress Party held their meetings in Yashwantrao Chavan Centre in south Mumbai and in Bhujbal Knowledge City in suburban Bandra, respectively, on Wednesday. Barely 48 hours after Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Ajit Pawar’s rebellion and swearing-in as Maharashtra’s Deputy Chief Minister, the resentment of a section of leaders from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena faction against Mr. Pawar’s NCP group grew more pronounced as the impending portfolio allocation threatened to snuff out their Ministerial ambitions. At a time when the Shinde camp leaders are still awaiting their turn in the long-pending exercise of the second phase of the Maharashtra Cabinet expansion, the alacrity with which the nine NCP leaders, including Mr. Ajit Pawar, were sworn in on Sunday has chagrined many Shinde Sena MLAs. In a dramatic turn of events which followed months of speculation that he was cosying up to the ruling BJP, Mr. Pawar — who is also NCP chief Sharad Pawar’s nephew — led a vertical split in his party and joined hands with the National Democratic Alliance on July 2 afternoon. Though he claimed to have the support of all his party’s MLAs, his uncle made it clear he did not back the move. Besides Ajit Pawar, eight other NCP MLAs, including Chhagan Bhujbal and Hasan Mushrif, were sworn in as ministers in the Eknath Shinde cabinet.