- NCP leaders Ajit Pawar and Sharad Pawar failed to agree on Pune civic election seat-sharing
- Sharad Pawar returned to Maha Vikas Aghadi for further seat-sharing talks
- Ajit Pawar's offer of 35 seats with the clock symbol was rejected by Sharad Pawar's faction
Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Ajit Pawar and his uncle Sharad Pawar could not come to an agreement today on whether they should contest the Pune Municipal Corporation election together, sources said.
After the talks failed, Sharad Pawar went back to the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) for seat-sharing discussions, sources said. Thereafter, the senior Pawar began hectic talks with Uddhav Thackeray's Shiv Sena and the Congress.
The Pune meeting happened around noon on Friday. The hurdle came in the form of a disagreement over the number of seats offered by Sharad Pawar's nephew to him, sources said.
Ajit Pawar's party was willing to let Sharad Pawar's party contest only 35 seats, that too using the 'clock' election symbol. The matter came to a full stop when the Sharad Pawar faction declined the offer outright and walked out of the meeting, sources said.
At the MVA meeting in a hotel in Pune, the leaders who participated include Bapusaheb Pathare and Ankush Kakade from the Sharad Pawar NCP faction, Arvind Shinde and Ramesh Bagwe from the Congress, and Vasant More from the Shiv Sena Uddhav Thackeray faction.
A meeting of the ruling Mahayuti will also be held tonight to clear the deadlock between the Shiv Sena and the BJP over 17 seats. A meeting with Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis reportedly reached a consensus on 210 seats.
For the BMC election, senior NCP (SP) leader Jayant Patil today met Uddhav Thackeray to discuss a possible alliance between the two parties, with just a few days left for nomination filing to end.
The meeting, which took place at Uddhav Thackeray's house 'Matoshree' in Bandra, lasted around two hours. It comes two days after Uddhav Thackeray and his cousin Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray forged an alliance for the elections to the cash-rich civic body to be held on January 15.
