'Not Our Path...': Sharad Pawar Reveals Offer of 160 Seats Before Maharashtra Polls

Politics Politics of India

Posted by AI on 2025-08-09 13:25:02 | Last Updated by AI on 2026-06-23 01:59:54

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Asserting that the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition in Maharashtra survived the BJP's "Operation Lotus", Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar has revealed that he and Rahul Gandhi were offered a whopping 160 seats to forge an alliance with the BJP before the 2019 Maharashtra polls.

In a startling revelation, Pawar, a veteran politician, claimed that two people, who were not named, had approached him and Gandhi with the offer, which they promptly rejected. "They (BJP) had offered 160 seats to us out of 288 seats in the Assembly," Pawar told reporters in Pune on Saturday. "One of the persons who made the offer said that the BJP is confident of winning 160 seats and believed that if we allied with them, the BJP would be able to form a government with a huge majority."

This significant political move came shortly after the October 2019 state elections, where the BJP emerged as the single largest party in the state with 105 seats, while the Shiv Sena won 56 seats. The NCP and Congress, pre-poll allies, secured 54 and 44 seats, respectively. The MVA was formed post-poll with all three parties denying the BJP a chance to form a government.

Pawar, who served as the deputy prime minister in the late 1990s, said that he and Gandhi, the former Congress party chief, "immediately rejected" the offer because it was "not on our path". The NCP chief added that the saffron party apparently wanted to offer him a role in the government, but he refused, opting to side with the Shiv Sena and Congress instead to form the MVA coalition.

The revealing comments come in the backdrop of the heated discussions between the BJP and Pawar's NCP over the government's stability in light of the resignation of Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray last month.

Rejecting suggestions that the MVA was formed just to deny the BJP the chance to form a government in 2019, Pawar asserted that it was a "people's government" and that all three parties had been working together smoothly since the alliance was forged.

"Operation Lotus" refers to the BJP's alleged attempt to engineer a coup or 'lotus bloom' in several state legislatures to pull legislators from other parties to defect to the BJP with the promise of rewards in the form of plum portfolios or other benefits.

The revelation of the BJP's offer to the NCP has the potential to raise questions about the ethics of political horse-trading in Indian politics and whether the democratic process can be genuinely participatory and transparent.

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