Ajit Pawar took oath as the Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra on Sunday along with eight other NCP leaders including party’s heavyweights like Dilip Walse Patil, Chhagan Bhujbal, Dhananjay Munde and Hasan Mushrif.
Deputy CM of Maharashtra submitted a list of 40 MLAs to governor Ramesh Bais, currently NCP has 54 MLA in assembly.
Ajit followed Shinde’s path
Following in Eknath Shinde’s footsteps, Ajit Pawar claimed be representative of NCP and to have “everyone’s” backing within the party, NCP Supremo and his uncle Sharad Pawar called his actions “robbery” rather than rebellion and has vowed to fight back.
The fact that Ajit felt sidelined by the party was no secret, but things reached a boiling point in the past few months when Sharad Pawar abruptly resigned as party president in the first week of May, ostensibly to quell the internal uprising that was brewing with Ajit at its helm, and then appointed Sule as the acting president after withdrawing his resignation, further marginalizing Ajit.
Ajit planned strategy for a year
According to source, Ajit had been planning strategy for nearly a year to take on his uncle and cousin Supriya. Ajit was actually the only NCP leader to explicitly say that Sharad Pawar’s resignation should be accepted in order to make space for new leadership when NCP Supremo announced his resignation at the Y B Chavan Centre in Mumbai, when other party leaders pleaded him not to resign.
Ajit wanted a position in organistion
On the party’s anniversary last month, Ajit requested that Sharad Pawar remove him from the position of leader of the opposition in the assembly and replace it with an organizational duty. He made an indirect attack on the NCP’s leadership in the same address on the party’s failure to form a government.
According to sources, Ajit set July 1 as the deadline for him to be elected as NCP president. When Sharad Pawar was unable to remove Jayant Patil from office, Ajit reportedly carried out his one-month-old plan to join the Shinde-Fadnavis government.
