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HomePoliticsMVA scions Praniti Shinde, Rohit Pawar spar over Solapur seat, spark Congress-NCP...

MVA scions Praniti Shinde, Rohit Pawar spar over Solapur seat, spark Congress-NCP spat

Last week, Rohit Pawar indicated that NCP might want seat in 2024, provoking response from Congress MLA Shinde & strife between parties' local units. Conflict now resolved, say leaders.

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Mumbai: Two dynasts of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) — the Nationalist Congress Party’s (NCP) Rohit Pawar and the Congress’s Praniti Shinde — had a public spat last week over the Solapur parliamentary seat, sparking a conflict between the two parties’ local units in one more sign of tension within the alliance.

The conflict was triggered by Rohit Pawar, NCP supremo Sharad Pawar’s grandnephew, saying that the leaderships of the Congress and the NCP would decide who gets the Solapur seat in the 2024 Lok Sabha election. The younger Pawar is a first-time MLA from Ahmednagar district’s Karjat-Jamkhed assembly constituency, while Shinde is a legislator from Solapur city. 

Solapur has traditionally been a Congress seat within the Congress-NCP alliance and also a party stronghold — Praniti Shinde’s father, former Maharashtra CM and Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde, held the Lok Sabha seat for three terms. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has, however, been making chinks in this fortress since 1996. Come 2019, the elder Shinde lost the seat to the BJP’s Jai Siddheshwar Shivachari Mahaswami. 

In response to Pawar’s remark, Praniti Shinde said he “hadn’t matured yet”. 

“Who is Rohit Pawar? He is a first-time MLA,” Shinde told reporters last week.  “Give him some time. Some people can be childish”.

By Monday, however, the local units had decided to bury the hatchet. This was after higher-ups in both parties directed them not to stretch the issue and to work together against the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), according to Congress and NCP leaders ThePrint spoke to.

“We had tea together with the NCP leaders and decided to tell all our karyakartas to end the spat and move forward, work with each other and not against each other,” Solapur Congress president Chetan Narote told ThePrint.

The Pawar-Shinde conflict is yet another instance of strife over seat sharing among the MVA parties — the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), the NCP, and the Congress — who had until 2019 been political rivals. The alliance also faces an internal rebellion in the upcoming Kasba Peth and Chinchwad by-polls. 


Also Read: Shinde govt’s Rs 143-cr publicity drive as BMC polls near — full-page ads, jingles on radio


If NCP asks for Solapur, should we ask for Baramati?’

According to a Solapur-based Congress functionary, this isn’t the first time Rohit Pawar has publicly said the NCP was interested in the seat; he’d also spoken about it at a cricketing event two months ago. But the Congress had decided to let it pass then, the functionary said.

“The Congress has been strong here for the past 50 years. If the NCP asks for Solapur, should we then ask for Baramati?” the functionary asked. 

Baramati is the home turf and bastion of the Pawar family, with Sharad Pawar’s daughter Supriya Sule holding the parliamentary seat and his nephew Ajit Pawar representing the assembly constituency. 

But after local NCP leaders grew more aggressive in response to Shinde’s remarks, Rohit Pawar tried to douse the fire himself by saying the Solapur legislator was like his “elder sister and has every right to speak.”

“So let us spend our energy to solve today’s main problem of unemployment without arguing among ourselves,” Pawar said in his tweet. “As for the question of Solapur seat, the senior leaders of both the parties will take a decision regarding it. I did not make any claim, I only expressed the feelings of the ordinary workers.” 

Solapur NCP president Bharat Jadhav told ThePrint that some enthusiastic workers had asked Pawar to put forth a proposal for the party to get the constituency in the seat-sharing arrangement for the 2024 general election. 

“He’d just said that the MVA leadership will take a decision, but some local Congress leaders misunderstood,” Jadhav said. “Our party leadership told us to not stretch the matter anymore, and we too have instructed our karyakartas to work with the BJP as our sole opponents.” 

(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)


Also Read: Shiv Sena factions clamour for party legacy on founder Balasaheb Thackeray’s 97th birthday


 

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