With nine NCP leaders, including nephew Ajit Pawar, joining the Eknath Shinde government in Maharashtra on Sunday, party chief Sharad Pawar took a swipe at the ruling BJP, saying that the development was not a "googly" but a "robbery".
Ajit Pawar, who was Leader of the Opposition in the state Legislative Assembly, on Sunday, took oath as the deputy chief minister, while eight MLAs from his party, including some veteran leaders, were inducted as ministers in the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.
Addressing a press conference here over the developments, Pawar senior said, Ajit Pawar and other NCP MLAs joining the Shinde government was a robbery.
"...It is not googly, it is a robbery. It is not an easy thing. The allegations levelled by Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) against the party...Now (he) has done an important work of exonerating some of the leaders from those allegations," Pawar said.
He was replying to a query about whether the surprising move by nine NCP leaders was a game plan of the BJP or a googly that he talked about recently.
Over the past few days, Pawar and the BJP were engaged in a war of words over the events surrounding the short-lived government in 2019 in Maharashtra, in which Ajit Pawar had taken oath as the deputy CM, while BJP's Devendra Fadnavis as the chief minister.
On Thursday, Pawar said "certain things were done" after the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly elections to expose the BJP and show how far it can go to gain power.
He said his father-in-law (Test player Sadu Shinde) was a googly bowler, and he himself (Pawar) was the chairman of the ICC. "So, without playing cricket, I knew where and when to bowl a googly," the NCP chief said that day.
His statement was in reaction to the claim made by Fadnavis in an interview to a news channel that Pawar had agreed to form a government with the BJP in 2019, but the latter backed off after three-four days.
After Pawar's 'googly' remark, Maharashtra BJP president Chandrashekhar Bawankule took potshots at him saying that the NCP chief had hatched a political conspiracy in 2019 and tried to destroy Ajit Pawar's political career by making him part of that conspiracy.
Bawankule, however, said it was Pawar's "last googly".