NCP (SP) chief Sharad Pawar says gone are the days of one-person rule, LS results to repeat in the assembly elections

NCP (SP) chief Sharad Pawar on Wednesday said gone are the days of one-person rule as the new government at the Centre could not have been formed by the BJP without the help of other parties. With the coalition government in place at the Centre, the Modi guarantee is now over, a change made possible by the power of the voters, he said.

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Pawar was speaking during a meeting in Pune's Purandar tehsil, a part of Baramati Lok Sabha constituency where he had come to review the water scarcity situation.

“Elections are over and a government has been formed (at the Centre). Last 10 years, the government was one person, but now it has been freed from it (that system). This time, the government has been formed with the help of others,” he said.

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"The situation was such that the government would not have been formed without the help of the chief ministers of Bihar (Nitish Kumar) and Andhra Pradesh (N Chandrababu Naidu). The government has been formed with their help, which means gone are the days of one person running the government. It also means that Modi's guarantee, about which we used to hear, is over and power to end it (this guarantee) lies with you," the former Union minister added.

He said the Lok Sabha election outcome showed that a similar result would be seen in the state assembly polls. "After the Lok Sabha poll results are replicated in the state assembly polls, I will give the reins of the state in your hands. The power in the state will come in the hands of our people and this power will be used to address critical issues and for that, I need your cooperation," Pawar told the gathering.

In the recently-held Lok Sabha elections, the BJP won 240 seats, falling short of the 272 majority mark and needing the support of allies in the party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) for government formation, a far cry from the 303 and 282 seats it had won in 2019 and 2014, respectively, to have a majority on its own. With support from Chandrababu Naidu's Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Nitish Kumar's JD(U), which won 16 and 12 seats in Andhra Pradesh and Bihar, respectively, and other alliance partners, the NDA crossed the halfway mark.

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On the other hand, the opposition INDIA bloc secured 233 seats, 99 of them by the Congress. In Maharashtra, the Mahayuti alliance - comprising BJP, Shiv Sena (led by Eknath Shinde) and NCP (led by Ajit Pawar) got 17 Lok Sabha seats while the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) comprising Congress, Shiv Sena (UBT) and NCP (SP) secured 30 seats of the total 48 seats.