Hitting back at Nationalist Congress Party president Sharad Pawar, Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Tuesday said neither she nor her son Rahul Gandhi or her party are to be blamed for the split in the alliance in Maharashtra.
Pawar had on Monday blamed Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi and former Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan for the break-up of the 15-year-old alliance ahead of the Assembly Elections.
“We have been noticing since long that Rahul Gandhi and his team were trying to marginalise the alliance partners though we also belonged to the Congress school of politics. So we knew that this day will come,” Pawar said.
“Prithviraj (Chavan) deliberately spread rumours about the NCP to demean us. We never had any problems with Vilasrao Deshmukh, Sushil Kumar Shinde or Ashok Chavan,” the NCP supremo added.
“As CM, Prithviraj was taking revenge because in 1999, he had to face defeat in the hands of NCP candidate in Lok Sabha elections,” Pawar said.
Stepping up his attack on the Congress, Pawar added, “The previous Congress chief ministers who led the alliance namely Vilasrao Deshmukh, Sushil Kumar Shinde and Ashok Chavan displayed the coalition mindset to run the government. But Prithviraj Chavan seemed to have a different mindset that queered the pitch.”