Sharad Pawar claims central leadership of Congress was not keen on taking advantage of growing rift between Sena-BJP in 2014

Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) supremo Sharad Pawar has claimed that the central leadership of the Congress was not keen on taking advantage of the growing distance between the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its then ally Shiv Sena ahead of the 2014 Maharashtra Assembly polls.

Had the Congress and Nationalist Congress Party contested the 2014 Assembly polls together, they would have retained power in Maharashtra, he wrote in the updated version of his autobiography, released on Tuesday.

In 2014, the BJP broke off its decades-old alliance with the Shiv Sena and contested the Assembly polls on its own. The alliance between the NCP and Congress too ended.

Pawar, who quit the Grand Old Party in 1999 to form the NCP, also claimed that after the debacle in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the Congress began to think that it would be helpful if the other parties which shared its ideology (like the NCP) grew weak.

Pawar also admitted that he was actively involved in ensuring that the distance between the BJP and Shiv Sena grew during this period. For the first time, the BJP and Shiv Sena contested the assembly elections separately in 2014, and afterwards the Sena took more than a month to join the BJP-led government.

After my statement extending support to the BJP for the sake of political stability, we were expecting the Sena to take some different stand. But it did not happen. At the same time, the BJP was trying to mend fences with the Sena, Pawar wrote.