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Pawar woos Sonia Gandhi : Names sea link after Rajiv Gandhi |
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Less than two months after refusing to accept the projection of Dr. Manmohan Singh as the UPA’s Prime Ministerial nominee, Nationalist Congress Party president and Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar is now wooing the Congress ahead of the Assembly elections in Maharashtra.
On Tuesday, June 30, Pawar surprised everyone when he suddenly proposed that the Bandra-Worli sea link newly inaugurated by Congress president Sonia Gandhi be named after Rajiv Gandhi. Observers say that Pawar used flowery language to praise the late Prime Minister. He said: “There can be no greater son of the soil, who can inspire the younger generation of Indians than Rajiv Gandhi.” This was a reference to Rajiv Gandhi’s birth in Mumbai.
Pawar’s overtures to Sonia Gandhi come at a time when senior Congress leaders from Maharashtra led by Union Heavy Industries Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh are opposing a tie-up between the Congress and the NCP for the Assembly elections.
Speaking at the function, Chief Minister Ashok Chavan quickly accepted Sharad Pawar’s proposal and announced that the sea link would be named after Rajiv Gandhi.
However, reports from Mumbai say that Sharad Pawar’s gesture has not gone down well with his party men who view it as symbolic of submission to the Congress in the run up to the Assembly elections.
The BJP and the Shiv Sena have criticised the naming of the sea link after Rajiv Gandhi. In a statement, Shiv Sena executive president Uddhav Thackeray said on July 1 that the Congress-NCP government had betrayed Maharashtra by not naming the sea link after state leaders like Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. If not Savarkar, he said, the bridge could have been named after any other social leader like Jyotirao Phule or Baba Saheb Ambedkar. He wondered why Sharad Pawar and Ashok Chavan had forgotten Phule and Ambedkar at the time of the sea link inauguration.
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