Some serious soul-searching is on the cards as top leaders of the Nationalist Congress Party meet in New Delhi on Monday to deliberate on the future course for the party, which is facing questions about its separate identity and making news for all the wrong reasons.
Sharad Pawar and his associates are expected to chalk out a future path for the NCP at the meeting of its working committee in the wake of its failure to click at the electoral box office even in the party chief's native state of Maharashtra. This was inspite of the fact that Pawar was projected as a PM prospect by his party and the NCP also hobnobbed with the Third Front spearheaded by the Left parties. His detractors like Union Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh have already launched a campaign in the Congress to dump NCP and go it alone in the upcoming Maharashtra assembly polls.
The arrest of NCP's Osmanabad MP Padamsinh Patil in a double murder case has come at the most inopportune time for NCP as it overshadowed the 10th anniversary celebrations. Pawar, along with P A Sangma and Tariq Anwar, had parted ways with Congress on the foreign origin issue of All India Congress Committee chief Sonia Gandhi in 1999. Ironically, soon after the Maharashtra elections that year, NCP joined hands with the Congress to form the government in the state, where the coalition has since been in power.
The recent meeting Sangma had with Sonia Gandhi in which he sought to apologise to her for whatever had happened ten years ago on the issue of her foreign origin had raised questions over the separate identity of the party. Pawar has ruled out merger with Congress, declaring that the party would continue to have its separate existence but maintained that the NCP's attitude would be one of cooperation with the Congress. He has conceded that the party received a setback in the recent Lok Sabha polls as it could secure only nine seats as against the expectation of around 15. While the vote percentage of the NCP in Maharashtra was 19.4 per cent as against 19.8 per cent of the Congress, he has said the fact is that "we will have to work hard in coming days".
"We have got patience. There are ups and downs in political life. In 1980, 50 of my 56 MLAs in Maharashtra had deserted me, but from six MLAs I had raised the strength to some 60 MLAs," said Pawar who has created a record of sorts by uninterruptedly winning elections to Assembly or the Lok Sabha for over 40 years.
