With just hours left for polling, the former Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan on Tuesday landed in a major controversy with his hard-hitting interview to an English daily in which he conceded that he did not act against “corrupt” Congress leaders in the Adarsh scam to save his party from being “decimated.”
Citing “compulsions” of coalition politics, Mr. Chavan also said that though he did not give former deputy CM and NCP leader Ajit Pawar a clean chit in the multicrore irrigation scam, he did not sack him as it “would have brought down the government.”
However, Mr. Chavan later said his remarks had been “distorted” and whatever he had done in his tenure was in the public domain. “I always believed that law will take its own course,” he said.
Cashing in on the ‘self-goal’ made by Mr. Chavan, the BJP said his comments were admission of his guilt and complicity in the corruption.
“This is clear admission by him that he ran a corrupt government. He protected the corrupt members of his team,” BJP general secretary Rajiv Pratap Rudy said.
The “Adarsh scam brought under the scanner [former CMs and Congress leaders] Vilasrao Deshmukh, Sushil Shinde and Ashok Chavan — the top Congress leadership in the State. If I had taken action against them, the party would have been decimated in Maharashtra. We could not shed them,” Mr. Chavan told the daily.
