Friction arose with Prithviraj Chavan as he had no experience: Ajit Pawar

Nationalist Congress Party leader Ajit Pawar said on Friday that the reason for the discord between him and then Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan was that the latter had no experience of the state's politics.

Pawar was deputy chief minister when Chavan headed the Congress-NCP alliance government between 2010 and 2014.

Asked about the talk of discord between him and Chavan during an interview at an event organised by the Lokmat media group here, Pawar said Chavan had never worked even as an MLA in the state as he was mostly based in Delhi. "Prithviraj Chavan had never worked as an MLA here. He was not aware of what kind of treatment we had received from people in the power....He had no experience of the state cabinet," the NCP leader said. "He had been working in the PMO and there is a difference between the state politics and politics in Delhi," Pawar added. Chavan, who was a minister in the Manmohan Singh government, became chief minister after Ashok Chavan resigned over the Adarsh scam allgations. Even though the NCP and Congress were allies, certain issues cropped up and as a result "some people" felt proximity to political rivals while the NCP appeared as "remote" to them, Pawar further said. It led to the defeat of the Democratic Front government in 2014, he said.

Asked what was his party's biggest mistake in the past, Pawar said it was the decision not to claim the chief minister's post in 2004 even though the NCP had won more seats than the ally Congress.

Leaders like him had to accept the decision as they were "junior" in the party then, Pawar added.