Amid reports of cracks within Maharashtra’s ruling Mahayuti alliance, NCP-SP leader Rohit Pawar has revealed that there is going to be a mass exodus from the NCP Ajit Pawar faction, feeding rumours of the alliance, which the BJP is part of, breaking up.
Talking to reporters on Monday, Sharad Pawar’s grandnephew Rohit Pawar said that almost 20 MLAs from Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar’s faction will join the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar) after the upcoming monsoon session of the state legislature.
Pawar maintained there are several NCP MLAs who have never spoken ill against party founder Sharad Pawar and other senior leaders after the July 2023 split in the outfit.
“But they have to attend the legislature session and get development funds for their constituencies. So they will wait till the session ends (before making switch over),” he added.
Sharad Pawar and other NCP (SP) leaders will make a decision on whom to take back in the fold, said the MLA from Karjat-Jamkhed in Ahmednagar district.
All is not right within the Mahayuti alliance, which includes BJP, Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde faction) and NCP (Ajit Pawar faction) and is part of the larger NDA alliance after it performed poorly during the Lok Sabha elections 2024.
The NDA won 17 out of 47 seats in the state while the INDIA bloc bagged 30 seats. Now the big test before the ruling alliance is the Maharashtra Assembly elections.
Meanwhile, the undivided NCP had won 54 assembly seats in the 2019 polls. When the party split in July 2023, the Ajit Pawar-led faction had claimed the support of around 40 MLAs.
The monsoon session of the legislature will begin on June 27 and end on July 12. This will be the last session before the state heads for assembly elections which are due in October.
Meanwhile, Shiv Sena-UBT’s Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar last week rejected any possibility of taking rebels back into the folds of the Maha Vikas Aghadi alliance, especially referring to Ajit Pawar.
With inputs from agencies
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