Factionalism likely to dominate Praful Patel’s felicitation on June 29
   Date :27-Jun-2023

Praful Patel 
 
 
Staff Reporter
After the Congress, now Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) also is facing the problem of factionalism in city. A clear division between the party’s State office-bearers and city unit is visible. The issue of factionalism in NCP’s city cadre is set to come up during felicitation of Praful Patel, who was recently appointed as National Working President of NCP.
 
NCP District and City Unit teams will felicitate Praful Patel on June 29. It will be the first felicitation of Patel after taking charge of an important position of the Party. The felicitation programme will be held at Kohinoor Lawns, Wathoda Ring Road, near Swaminarayan Mandir, at 11 am. Former Home Minister Anil Deshmukh is monitoring the arrangements of the programme. To review the preparations for the event, Deshmukh has convened a meeting of the party’s City and District office-bearers on Tuesday. The respective heads, Duneshwar Pethe and Baba Gujar, also will be present. The meeting will be held at 11 am on Tuesday at the party’s Ganeshpeth office. In the past some days, the agitations or any social programmes, party meetings are being held without either of the group’s office bearers. If State Group organises some programme, the office-bearers of City Unit abstain, and vice versa.
 
The State Group has ex-City President Anil Ahirkar, ex-MLA Dinanath Padole, Abha Pandey, Shrikant Shivankar, Pravin Kunte Patil. The City Unit group has Duneshwar Pethe, Avinish Pandey, Shailendra Tiwari and others. The factionalism came to the fore when Vice-President of the City Unit Rupesh Pannase, Sukhdev Wanjari (who was removed from the post of South Nagpur President), Javed Habib almost joined Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) floated by Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao. Both were brought back in the NCP fold. Pethe changed the presidents of four Assembly constituencies viz East, South, South West and West Nagpur. In East Avinish Pandey, Raja Baig in West (in place of Shilesh Pande), Moreshwar Jadhav in South (in place of Sukhdev Wanjari) and Rajusingh Chavan and Ashutosh Belekar in South West (in place of Bhiyalal Thakur).
 
Baba Gujar too made two changes in District unit. All these changes were opposed by Pravin Kunte. According to Pethe, the changes were not made without permission of Anil Deshmukh. Deshmukh maintains silence on the crisis brewing within the party. According to highly placed sources, Patel, along with ex-Minister Dilip Walse Patel who was entrusted the responsibility of Nagpur and Gadchiroli, is likely to speak to both the factions during his visit to Nagpur.
NCP should not have faced such problems at least in the wake of Municipal polls poised to be held in September-October, said a senior functionary of the party.