By IANS
Mumbai : Congress state unit chief Prabha Rau has stoked afresh the recent controversies over Revenue Minister Narayan Rane’s public criticism of Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh and Nationalist Congress Party president Sharad Pawar’s meeting with Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray.
In an oblique reference to what was seen as Rane’s self-promotional efforts in Delhi earlier this month, Rau said Friday evening that the party must be wary of the entrants “not all of whom might have joined the party with selfless motives”.
Rane, who was chief minister of the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) alliance government in 1998, joined the Congress two years ago deserting Shiv Sena. He is believed to be pressing the Congress leadership for the chief ministers’ post in the Democratic Front government.
In her speech during a Seva Dal function at the Tilak Bhawan here, state Congress chief Prabha Rau also recalled Pawar’s betrayal of the Congress to form the Progressive Democratic Front government with the help of some opposition parties in 1979.
“I do not know whether others have forgotten Pawar’s PDF (Progressive Democratic Front) experiment, but I haven’t”, she said. Pawar had brought down the then Congress government in Maharashtra led by the late S.B. Chavan by quitting it along with his followers and coming to power with the support of the Peasants’ and Workers” Party and other opposition parties.
In a veiled attack on Union Agriculture Minister Pawar for talking “out of turn” at a function in Akola about waiving the distressed Vidarbha farmers’ loan, Rau said he could have communicated his thoughts to the Congress-NCP’s Democratic Front government in the state instead.
Clarifying her remarks later on Congress entrants, Rau told reporters that she meant not all those who joined the Congress in the last 40 years were motivated by the desire to make sacrifices for the party and the nation.
Believed to have lobbied for Rane’s case with the party’s central leadership, Rau was, however, quick to distance herself from Rane’s controversial press conference in Delhi followed by his meeting with party president Sonia Gandhi earlier this month.
Elaborating on her objection to Sharad Pawar’s remarks at a farmers’ rally at Akola in west Vidarbha, Rau said the union agriculture minister had promised a Congress delegation that met him with a plea to waive farmers’ loan that he would get back to them after consulting his cabinet colleagues.
Confusion persists over the issue of loan waiver a month after Deshmukh telling the state legislature that though his government wanted to rid the farmers of their debt burden, it could not do so without the central support.