Be fair to juniors, Sharad Pawar tells his men

Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) president and Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar has urged all cabinet ministers from his party to adopt corrective measures to ensure they do not antagonise their junior ministers and party workers.

Pawar held a closed-door meeting on Saturday with the ministers to discuss administrative and organisational matters. While giving audience to ministers complaining against chief minister Ashok Chavan, he said, “Nobody should work so as to antagonise others. The minister of state also feels upset when cabinet ministers don’t allocate responsibilities of their respective departments. Even they feel sidelined when denied the work.”

The NCP president said the complaints by workers and ministers of NCP against Congress and vice versa does not help in the healthy administration of state. “It has to be a collective responsibility and each one of us should be fair,” he said.

A minister present at the meeting said, “While it is true that NCP ministers vehemently complained against the high-handedness of Chavan, Pawar was not overwhelmingly endorsing their views. On the contrary, the NCP president and the Union agriculture minister adopted the role of a statesman giving them strong messages to keep the state welfare as their top priority while delegating their duties as ministers.”

Sources in the NCP said, “Pawar may have allowed all the ministers to air their grievances against Chavan for withholding their files. But at the end, instead of ticking him off, he has advised his ministers to understand how their juniors in the Congress or the NCP might feel when they are not allowed to take departmental decisions.”