Ahead of the Maharashtra assembly elections, the Sharad Pawar-led faction on Friday moved the Supreme Court (SC). They have demanded that both factions of the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) be given new election symbols. A bench of Justice Suryakant and Justice Ujjwal Bhuiyan fixed September 25 for hearing the petition. Earlier, senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi, on behalf of the Sharad Pawar faction, argued that in view of the assembly elections in Maharashtra, he wanted to list the case urgently.
Singhvi said that until a final decision is taken on the matter, both the groups should be given new election symbols before the Maharashtra assembly elections. Sharad Pawar has moved the Supreme Court against the Election Commission’s February 6 order recognising the group led by Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar as the de facto Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).
The Election Commission has also allotted the NCP’s election symbol ‘clock’ to the group led by Ajit Pawar. The election symbol of the NCP founded by Sharad Pawar was ‘clock’ before the split. On March 19, the apex court had allowed the Sharad Pawar faction to use ‘Nationalist Congress Party-Sharadchandra Pawar’ as the name and the election symbol ‘man playing trumpet’ ahead of the Lok Sabha elections in the country.
The apex court had on February 19 directed that the Election Commission’s order allocating the party name ‘Nationalist Congress Party-Sharadchandra Pawar’ to the Sharad Pawar faction will continue till further orders. Maharashtra Assembly Speaker Rahul Narvekar had on February 15 said that the Ajit Pawar-led NCP faction is the real NCP and the anti-defection provisions in the Constitution cannot be used to suppress internal dissent.
Sharad Pawar founded the NCP in 1999 along with former Lok Sabha Speaker P Sangma and Tariq Anwar after being expelled from the Congress. In July last year, Ajit Pawar joined hands with most of the NCP MLAs and supported the BJP-Shiv Sena government led by Eknath Shinde.