| MUMBAI/PUNE, MAY 13:
For Sharad Pawar, the moment of personal triumph was tinged by a deeper loss. The man who might have been a kingmaker, has had to settle for the satisfaction of winning Baramati by a margin of over four lakh votes (even that isn’t a record).
With his party relegated to fourth place in the state’s Lok Sabha tally, Pawar will have to be content with steamrolling one-time close aide from the cooperative sector and BJP rival Prithviraj Jachak by a margin of 4,22,798 votes to enter the Lok Sabha a sixth time.
Trailing behind Congress (13), BJP (13) and Shiv Sena (12), NCP’s score of nine seats has undermined Pawar’s ambitions of playing kingmaker in Delhi.
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Throughout the campaign, Pawar had insisted that Maharashtra would play a ‘‘decisive role’’ in determining who would be the next PM. But all those calculations have been upset by reversals faced in Vidarbha and Marathwada.
Many in NCP were counting on him to play a bigger role in a scenario that projected a tally of 200-210 seats for Congress. ‘‘In such a scenario, Pawarsaheb would have played a key role in the formation of a coalition government. In exchange, he would have bargained for a plum post like deputy PM,’’ said a key NCP functionary.
Finishing on equal terms with the BJP-Sena alliance in Maharashtra means Pawar will not be in a position to dictate terms at the Centre. Also, he will have to stomach the prospect of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi — whose foreign origin spurred him to walk out and form the NCP — becoming the next PM.
Pawar has publicly taken an accommodating position. ‘‘Need of the hour is a stable government,’’ he said at his South Mumbai residence. NCP will support the Congress-led government, but whether or not it joins the government will be known in a day or two, he said. Pawar is likely to meet Sonia on Saturday while the party executive will meet on May 15 to chalk out further strategies.
Asked if his bargaining power had declined with the arithmetic being in favour of the Congress, he shot back,‘‘Where is the question of bargaining when we have decided to go with Congress?’’ And on the question of accepting Sonia as PM, he made it clear that the decision could not be influenced by him: ‘‘It is for the Congress to decide.’’
Pawar instead chose to dwell on the factors that resulted in his party’s tally remaining a single digit. The BSP and SP came in for criticism for their role, which he said ‘‘was not favourable to the alliance.’’
‘‘The Congress-NCP alliance was trailing in Vidarbha and Marathwada and preliminary analysis showed the BSP has impacted our performance,’’ Pawar said.
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