NCP targets Cong for poor show in general elections

Though the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) are allies in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government and have fought the Lok Sabha and the Assembly elections in Maharashtra together, all is not well between them.

At an extended working committee meeting followed by a national convention that ended today, the NCP targeted the Congress for its bad performance in the general elections, while conceding that its own leadership was also to blame for its ‘lack of popularity’.

The NCP has nine MPs in the Lok Sabha.In the resolution on its organisational matters, the party said the farm loan waiver, debt write-off and accompanying pro-farmer measures were “an achievement of our president, Sharad Pawar, but other coalition parties took advantage of it”.The NCP also criticised the ‘rug-pulling’ activities of the Congress in Maharashtra, Goa and Bihar where the two parties fought together, concluding that ‘alliance politics did not give us good results’. In Maharashtra, the NCP said it won eight seats and lost five, including two sitting MPs, because the Congress “stabbed the party (NCP) in the back”.