 "Ajit Pawar")
Twelve days after he was sworn in as the deputy chief minister of Maharashtra, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Ajit Pawar was allocated the finance and planning portfolio on Friday.
Eight of Pawar’s NCP colleagues who were sworn in as ministers on July 2 also received their portfolios, a statement issued by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde’s office said.
Pawar, who took charge of his new responsibilities later in the day, had been briefed by finance and planning department secretaries. Commenting on the development, Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Sanjay Raut claimed that Pawar would soon replace Shinde as the CM.
Pawar was the finance and planning minister in the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi government that collapsed when Shinde walked out of the Shiv Sena with most of its legislators and allied with the Bharatiya Janata Party in June 2022. Among their other complaints, the Shinde-led group blamed Pawar’s unfairness as the finance minister towards the Shiv Sena legislators for their defection. Shinde-led Sena MLAs had again objected to finance and planning to go to Pawar.
In a development that could have a bearing on the continuance of Shinde and others as legislators, the Supreme Court on Friday sought a response from the office of the Maharashtra Assembly speaker on a plea seeking a direction to adjudicate their disqualification petitions expeditiously.
A Bench headed by Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud passed the order while hearing a plea filed by Shiv Sena (UBT) MLA Sunil Prabhu. As the chief whip of the undivided Shiv Sena, Prabhu had in 2022 filed the disqualification petitions against Shinde and other MLAs. “We will issue notice returnable in two weeks,” the Bench, also comprising Justices P S Narasimha and Manoj Misra, said.
Apart from Pawar, NCP’s Dhananjay Munde was allotted the agriculture portfolio, and Dilip Walse-Patil will be the cooperation minister. Others to be allocated portfolios are Hasan Mushrif (medical education), Chhagan Bhujbal (food and civil supplies), Dharmrao Atram (food and drugs administration), Sanjay Bansode (sports), Aditi Tatkare (woman and child development), and Anil Patil (relief, rehabilitation, and disaster management).
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Including nine NCP ministers, there are 29 Cabinet ministers in Maharashtra. The Maharashtra council of ministers can have a maximum of 43 ministers. The BJP, the principal party in the coalition with 105 MLAs, has 10 ministers, including Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis. With Tatkare’s induction, a woman MLA has been given a Cabinet berth in the Shinde government for the first time.
Ambadas Danve, leader of Opposition in the Maharashtra Legislative Council, said the Shiv Sena MLAs had accused Ajit Pawar of depriving them of funds when they were part of the MVA and left the party, and today the same person became the state's finance minister.
