NCP gearing up for frontal attack on Cong

Mumbai : The Sharad Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), hit by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) decision to dissolve the board of directors of the Maharashtra StateCooperative Bank (MSCB ), is gearing up for a long-drawn cold war with its poll ally in the state – the Congress .
The Congress-NCP alliance has been ruling the state for last 12 years .
Pawar himself will not be attending the extended state executive committee meeting scheduled on Thursday at Y B Chavan centre .In his absence , deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar and state NCP president Madhukar Pichad would be in charge of conducting the crucial meeting . The party is fully aware that it is the Congress high command which has initiated the action against the bank . The MSCB , Asia’s largest cooperative bank , has for years been a weapon for the NCP to control rural economics and exercise its political clout.
When Pawar set up the NCP on June 10, 1999 , his nephew Ajit Pawar was the MSCB chairman and used its power to tame a few sugar barons to part ways with the Congress and join the Pawar bandwagon . With zilla parishad elections coming up in the state , the bank’s political clouttocontrolthe rural network is more important for the NCP than its economic power to oblige the farmers .
The question doing rounds in the political circles is whether Ajit Pawar will use the executive meeting to browbeat the Congress in view of cancellation of the weekly state cabinet meeting .
Pichad told TOI that the executive meeting is being held to discuss organizational matters and preparations for various mass contact programmes to celebratethe party’sfoundation day – June 10. The party is holding a convention of Dalits and other backward class people on its foundation day and is expecting to draw a large number of people from Mumbai and other parts of the state .
However , a powerful lobby within the party is gearing up for a frontal attack on the Congress for ignoring the interests of the peasantry in the state by dissolving the most powerful bank . They point out that the kind of objections raised by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard ) and the RBI are not new . “In the earlier reports too, you will find the same observations and the NPA has been higher since the farmers as well as the sugar factories depend on monsoon . The bank has acted at the behest of the political masters in Delhi,” a senior NCP minister from the cooperative sector observed .