Many Congress MLAs are unhappy with the party ministers in the coalition government for ignoring their constituencies.
New Delhi: Recent events and alleged non-cooperation by senior Congress ministers in the coalition government of Maharashtra have given rise to factionalism in the party’s state unit to the extent that many party MLAs are planning to meet the high command in New Delhi and raise the issue.
Sources told ‘The Sunday Guardian’ that a group of Congress MLAs are unhappy with the ministers in the state government for ignoring their constituencies which is harming the interest of the MLAs in particular and the party in general. They also said that the party organisation and the ministers are not on the same page on many other issues.
A senior Congress leader said, “In the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government, the ministers belonging to Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) give major grants to MLAs of their party from their ministerial quota and help them build goodwill in their respective constituencies. However, the case of our party is different. The senior ministers of our party are not doing that.”
“NCP is strong in the sugar belt of western Maharashtra. Our state unit is also trying to strengthen itself in the state but for that, you need to secure the strongholds. All the 44 MLAs won on their merit and goodwill against the powerful BJP-Shiv Sena alliance. Now, they need to carry on the momentum and for that, support from the ministers in the form of developmental projects in the Assembly segments is needed,” he added.
In the 2019 Assembly elections, Congress had won 44 seats and its ally NCP won 54 seats while BJP won 105 seats and its ally Shiv Sena won 56 seats. But later, Sena broke the alliance and joined the NCP-Congress alliance to form the government under the chief ministership of Uddhav Thackeray. The state has a total of 288 Assembly segments.
Talking to ‘The Sunday Guardian’, Hemant Ambekar, a senior political analyst based in Mumbai, said, “In the MVA alliance and even within the party, Congress old guards are not willing to accommodate the new generation.
Leaders like Balasaheb Thorat are veterans while many party MLAs are relatively new. Even the party’s state president Nana Patole is young and quite aggressive, who wants the Congress to grow on its own in the state. But this is not going down well with Shiv Sena and NCP, who are blocking his path. We may see the issue snowball in future as running a three-party coalition government is very difficult.”
In recent times, the Congress is getting mixed results in the state with the party winning the Deglur-Biloli Assembly bypoll where party candidate Jitesh Antapurkar defeated the BJP’s Subhash Sabne by a margin of 41,000 votes. On the other hand, saffron party candidate Chandrashekhar Bawankule defeated Congress candidate Mangesh Deshmukh in the Nagpur local bodies Legislative Council seat.
In the coming months, the politics within Congress and MVA will get further complicated with the elections to Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), known as ‘Mini-Assembly’, and other corporation polls approaching. The grand old party has declared not to fight it in alliance with Shiv Sena and NCP.