As 2014 polls loom, Pawar’s hopes rise?
Nationalist Congress Party founder-president Sharad Pawar is way too sophisticated a politician to throw his hat into the ring for Prime Minister when he knows he runs a small party with only minor representation in Parliament.
His ambition had been made explicit once when he hadn’t broken from the Congress and the top slot became available after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. But political circumstances made the formidable Maharashtra leader yield to P.V. Narasimha Rao at that juncture.
Much water having flowed under the bridge since then, Mr Pawar is now more aware of his limitations, but appears to have not abandoned hope altogether of pulling off the near-impossible. In calibrated remarks published on Sunday, the NCP strongman almost ruled out BJP leader Narendra Modi’s chances of becoming PM, saying the Gujarat CM had peaked too early, and maintained that the next PM will be someone who was acceptable to a clutch of regional bosses.
He named Mulayam Singh Yadav, Mayawati, Nitish Kumar, Mamata Banerjee, Naveen Patnaik and Jayalalithaa in this context, and probably shrewdly calculated that together they might win enough seats to carry weight but reach no consensus on one among them taking the top job. Such a state of affairs might just open a small window of opportunity for someone like himself, especially since no regional satrap would harbour a threat from a minor party like the NCP.
This is a long shot, but smart thinking nevertheless. But it also betrays possible calculations that the NCP would be ready to jump ship if the offer is right, signifying no strategic stakes for the party in the Congress-led UPA, although for now Mr Pawar has been careful to assert that the NCP remains part of UPA. This only means that the NCP would like a pre-poll arrangement with the Congress in Maharashtra. Political analysis suggests that after the polls it might be each party for itself.
In real terms, the NDA has practically ceased to exist and is the obsolete expression still used to denote the combination of the BJP, Shiv Sena and Akali Dal. Even so, leaders of these parties tend to speak in one voice about the idea of the NDA coming to power by dethroning the UPA. The same, however, does not hold for the NCP, which, no matter how small, is now the second most important party in the UPA. There are no surprises here. In the past too, the NCP boss had tended to make ambivalent noises in the run-up to Lok Sabha elections.
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