Ajit Pawar holds meeting of project-reviewing unit parallel to CM’s war room

The first meeting of the project-monitoring unit was held on August 8, 2023, within a month of Ajit Pawar’s induction into the three-party government

MUMBAI: After the NCP’s abject defeat in the Lok Sabha elections, deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar is back to work. On Thursday, he held a meeting of the ‘project-monitoring unit’ that he formed last year, which had led to rumblings of discontent between the Shiv Sena and NCP. The unit is parallel to the chief minister’s ‘war room’ constituted to review the progress of selected projects, and its creation had not gone down well with chief minister Eknath Shinde.

Ajit Pawar holds meeting of project-reviewing unit parallel to CM’s war room

On Thursday, Pawar reviewed several projects, many of which were outside Pune district of which he is the guardian minister. A release issued by his office listed the projects, which ranged from Satara Military School, Satara Medical College, Rewas-Reddi Coastal Highway, Alibag Medical College, GST Bhavan at Wadala and the Pune-Nashik High-Speed Railway among others. Also in the list was the construction of the Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj Research, Training and Human Development Institute headquarters in Pune and its divisional offices in Nashik, Kolhapur, Nagpur and Amravati, Pune Metro Line 3 and Pune Ring Road. Chief secretary Nitin Kareer and around a dozen secretaries and senior officials were present at the meeting.

The first meeting of the project-monitoring unit was held on August 8, 2023, within a month of Ajit Pawar’s induction into the three-party government. It had led to a tussle between Ajit and the chief minister. However, a senior official from Ajit’s office said the unit was not a parallel mechanism. “He created a similar set-up when he was deputy CM in the previous government,” said the official. “Besides, he never stopped holding meetings of the project-monitoring unit. The last meeting was held on January 4.”

The meeting assumes significance against the backdrop of the NCP’s drubbing in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections. The party could win only one of the four seats it contested, and Ajit’s wife Sunetra was also defeated on their home turf Baramati. Since then, Ajit has reportedly been under pressure from his party colleagues to get more aggressive, especially with regard to the power-sharing deal and seat-sharing formula for the upcoming assembly elections.

On June 9, therefore, he demanded expansion of the state cabinet. “We want the state cabinet to be expanded. I have already discussed it with chief minister Eknath Shinde and deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, and both are positive about it,” he said in New Delhi after refusing to accept a junior minister’s post in PM Modi’s government.

The NCP is looking to get one more cabinet berth and at least three to four minister of state berths in the state ministerial council. At present, there are nine cabinet berths in the state cabinet, party insiders said.

Differences in the coalition government came to the fore again when senior minister Chhagan Bhujbal criticised PM Modi for targeting Muslims during his Lok Sabha election speeches. Without taking Modi’s name, he referred to his controversial speech in which he had claimed that the Congress would redistribute Hindus’ wealth among Muslims. “Muslims will get this, they will get that,” said Bhujbal. “Sometimes we give pain to a community by saying something we don’t even mean.”

Bhujbal said this had impacted the party, as Muslim votes did not come to the NCP. The same thing, he said, happened with other communities such as Dalits and tribals. “As a party, we have to create trust in their minds,” he declared. “We follow the ideology of Shahu, Phule and Ambedkar but we have to prove this through our actions.”