Maharashtra awaits new CM

A decision on the chief ministership of Maharashtra was held up for yet another day as the newly elected legislators of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) had a meeting in Mumbai but could come to no concrete decision, reiterating once again that their leader, Sharad Pawar, should decide whether to accept the Congress offer or not.

Congress leader Pranab Mukherjee , who is heading the talks, said yesterday if the NCP wanted, it could have 24 ministers, five more than 1999, but the chief ministership would have to be with the Congress.

"We have not given up our claim for the post of chief minister," NCP spokesman Vasant Chavan told reporters after the legislature party meeting.

He said the MLAs refused to discuss the proposal saying, in the legislature party meeting on October 18, they had passed a resolution authorising Pawar to take a decision in this regard.

Asked about the NCP's stand on the Congress proposal, Chavan said: "We have received a proposal from the Congress after a period of eight days, our party needs one-two days to formulate its stand."

What appeared to irk the NCP was the public nature of the offer. Pawar and his team did not bother to hide their indignation because they read this as yet another exercise to browbeat a party that actually had the bigger numbers.

"We should have been consulted before the Congress offer was made public. Do they think simply because they speak to us through the media, we will accept the offer?" an angry NCP leader told Business Standard.

The NCP interpreted Mukherjee's statement to mean that the Congress was trying to threaten it into submission and went into a huddle. The Congress legislators had their own meeting in Mumbai but in the absence of a consensus among the two allies, the general expectation that Sushil Kumar Shinde was set to return as the chief minister, was finding less and less acceptability as the day wore on.

Two groups of leaders in the Congress""one led by party managers like Margaret Alva and the other led by local Maharashtra leaders like Kripashankar Singh""debated the pros and cons of handing over the chief ministership to the NCP as opposed to keeping plum portfolios themselves.

While some senior Congress leaders in New Delhi said giving the chief ministership to an NCP nominees would, in the long run, be more dangerous for the party because of Pawar's proclivity to infiltrate and win over the Congress turf, newly-elected Congress legislators in Mumbai were muttering that if the NCP got all the important portfolios and they were left only with the chief ministership and a handful of inconsequential portfolios, the NCP would overwhelm the government.

According to the current offer, the Congress is to get only 19 portfolios and the NCP, 24.