Congress, NCP battle for CM's post

Frenzied bargaining fails to resolve issue, hard negotiations likely to continue

A decision on the chief ministership of Maharashtra eluded both the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and frenzied bargaining and brinkmanship continued for the whole day today.

Top Congress leaders like Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad as well as party general secretaries Margaret Alva and Digvijay Singh and Maharashtra party unit chief Prabha Rau held meetings with NCP leaders to resolve what appears to have become a knotty problem.

With 71, two seats more than the Congress' 69 in the Assembly, the NCP refused to budge from the claim that the chief ministership should go to it.

The Congress' riposte to this was to assert that three CPI(M) and two independents who had won the election legitimately belonged to the Congress camp.

But NCP leaders said if the 1999 formula had to be applied, the bigger party should be the one to get the chief ministership with the deputy chief minister and a majority of portfolios going to smaller parties.

But they also said the situation in 1999 had been different because then the two parties had contested elections separately and come together later. Now, they wanted more because they had won more, they said.

The Congress' argument was that because the NCP and the Congress had contested on the basis of a common manifesto, the Congress had as much claim to deciding the chief minister as the NCP. Congress leaders let the NCP know that they had no objection to Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar becoming the chief minister again, winding up his Delhi operations.

Alternatively, another leader"" anyone whom Pawar considers suitable ""could become the chief minister but in that event Pawar should be ready to merge the NCP with the Congress.

Both propositions hold little attraction for Pawar. Not only has he been the chief minister of Maharashtra four times in the past, but also moving to Mumbai would mean leaving the field in Delhi open to the machinations of political rivals like Arjun Singh. Merger, NCP leaders said, was out of the question and could not even be countenanced.

Murmurs have already started in the Congress that Pawar did not play a straight bat at the stage of ticket distribution which is why the party had come to such a pass.

Congress leaders are saying in 15 seats""some in Vidarbha, for example""the party was outmanoeuvred by Pawar because seats that were legitimately of the Congress were usurped by the NCP (in most of the seats, the Congress had been in the second place in the 1999 election).

Therefore, merely that the NCP had won in seats that should have gone to the Congress, did not give it the right to dictate terms on chief ministership.

Pawar's response was to throw in the towel and tell the Congress that the NCP would be happy to stay out of the government and support a Congress chief minister from the outside. But this clearly makes for an unstable and shaky minority government that could cast its shadow on the arrangements in New Delhi as well.

Besides this, a high order of administrative and political acumen is needed to run such a complicated coalition and Congress leaders said they really did not have a leader in Maharashtra who could handle a situation with a centre of gravity as slippery as this.

As a new government has to be sworn in by October 20, the chances are that a breakthrough will be achieved tomorrow. But it is clear that now, the onus of anointing a chief minister has become a matter of prestige for the Congress.

It is also conscious that without it, the NCP cannot form a government unless it gives up everything and goes with the BJP-Shiv Sena, a political impossibility. Hard negotiating is likely to continue through the night.