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No merger with Congress: Pawar

Sharad Pawar

New Delhi: Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) supremo Sharad Pawar on Sunday ruled out the merger of his party with the Congress.

At the same time, the Union Agriculture Minister emphasised that the NCP’s attitude had been one of understanding and cooperation with the Congress and “will continue to be so.” He said his party favoured working together with the Congress in the coming Assembly elections in Maharashtra and “we feel that the party’s [Congress] leadership feels the same way, whatever some leaders in the State may be saying.”

Mr. Pawar dismissed as a media creation the impression that the NCP was on the horns of a dilemma of whether to join the Congress as the issue of the foreign origin of Congress president Sonia Gandhi was no longer relevant.

He told PTI that the thrust of the thought of Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru on which the party was based was on “decentralisation of the decision-making process. We believe that you can develop leadership [at the local level] only through such a process.”

Mr. Pawar’s remarks came close on the heels of the recent meeting his close associate and the former Lok Sabha Speaker, P.A. Sangma, had with Sonia Gandhi when he apologised to her for whatever happened 10 years ago on the issue of her foreign origin.

Mr. Pawar conceded that the party received a setback in the Lok Sabha polls. It could secure only nine seats. Acknowledging that the vote percentage of the NCP in Maharashtra was 19.4 per cent, against 19.8 per cent of the Congress, he said the fact was “we will have to work hard in the coming days.”

“We have got patience; there are ups and downs in political life,” Mr. Pawar said— PTI

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