Impressive to lacklustre? NCP enters 15th year as its footprint withers

Friday is the 15th anniversary of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), founded with grate élan, and in the belief, that instead of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which was talking adversely of Sonia Gandhi’s Italian origins, it could capitalise it for itself in Maharashtra. That’s why Sharad Pawar, apart from other discomforts in the party, chose to break away. In his memoirs, On My Terms: From the Grassroot to the Corridors of Power, unfortunately not yet widely read or quoted from, which is a surprise, because he is a man who holds everything very close to his chest, he had written that Mrs Gandhi’s origins had “reached far and deep” and “would take centre stage in election(s)”. [caption id=“attachment_2755964” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  NCP chief Sharad Pawar. PTI[/caption] It didn’t work that way at all, at least in terms of the outcomes at the hustings. His party won 58 Maharashtra Legislative Assembly seats that year, and had to tie up with a Sonia-led Congress to form the government. Even to Pawar, whose electoral politics is tempered with self-created gambles, it was an embarrassment he hid well. The NCP is now at its lowest in morale — 15 years being too small a time span for it to have been humbled to a position where it cannot even have a Leader of Opposition in the state, which forms its main base. That it has a few MLAs and MPs from hither and thither is only of some arithmetical relevance to retain the ‘national’ tag. It, in fact, has become a ‘family’ entity, which however, is not unique only to the NCP. It is another matter that NCP has not defined what ‘nationalist’ in its name meant, but being anti-Soinia Gandhi, a person of foreign origin, one can draw conclusions, though it does not exactly match the BJP’s definition. Now that it has made peace of a kind with Congress, in the sense that it has not totally fallen out with the like-minded ‘secular’ party, that word and whatever meaning it carries is all right with the other. When the party was being formed at a rally at Shivaji Park that year, it was by far more impressive than Shiv Sena ever did in its history. Every political party had avoided the grounds for election rallies till then because it was hard to fill; even the Congress had balked later, with Murli Deora counselling the High Command to choose other locations to avoid being compared to the Sena. NCP made bold there and how! The impression then was that the party had already won the state, and the votes to be cast later would significantly tilt in its way. It took lot of hard work and a tie-up with the Congress to better it to 71 in 2004. Since then, the two parties are in a competitive intimacy at one time and daggers drawn at another. The two cannot do without each other. That also meant weakening of the anti-Sonia Gandhi platform. So much so, that in 2004, before the Parliamentary elections, Pawar had set his heart on Manmohan Singh becoming the prime minister, which happened. It has never been revealed whether Sonia Gandhi’s ‘sacrifice’ of not becoming a prime minister was a part of a poll-pact between NCP and Congress. Chances are, it was. The gung-ho outlook, the can-do spirit that prevailed in 1999 is quite missing now. [caption id=“attachment_1765173” align=“alignright” width=“380”]  NCP members. AFP[/caption] Its first state unit president, Chhagan Bhujbal is in jail accused of and investigated for disproportionate assets with his nephew for company, and a son — both lawmakers — under scanner, the mood cannot be positive and it isn’t. It also has Pawar’s nephew, Ajit, who like Bhujbal was a deputy chief minister, and a later party chief, Sunil Tatakare who was also a minister, suspected of some scams in irrigation contracts. That they are not being investigated despite nearly two years of BJP’s rule and its tenuous partnership with Shiv Sena, may have something to do with politics — of BJP keeping its options open in the event that Sena acts up beyond mere fulminations. This delay has not added to the lustre of BJP that has been going to town of wanting to get the country rid of corruption. Nor has it helped NCP breathe, except that the Bhujbals are being shown as examples of what could await others.