NCP chief asks workers to learn PR from RSS

Pep talk: Sharad Pawar addresses party supporters at Pimpri-Chinchwad in Pune on Thursday.

With the Assembly polls around the corner, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar on Thursday exhorted his party workers to take lessons from the skilful public relations of the members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

“I am not saying that one must take everything from them [the RSS]… But their workers must be commended on their doggedness in reaching out to the public and propagating about their organization,” Mr. Pawar said, speaking during a pre-poll review meeting of NCP party leaders, office bearers and workers in Pimpri-Chinchwad.

Lauding the tenacity of the RSS activists, he related an anecdote to enthuse his own activists to canvass harder for the coming polls.

“If the RSS workers have to cover five houses during an outreach drive, and if they find one house locked, then they come back in the evening. If that house is still locked, then they return next morning…the point is they never let-up and this is what one must learn from them,” Mr. Pawar said.

Mr. Pawar presided over the meet, the purpose of which was to introspect on the NCP’s poor show in the Lok Sabha elections while strategising how to shore up the party’s crumbling base in Pimpri-Chinchwad.

“With a little over two months to go for the Assembly polls, one must begin door-to-door campaigning in earnest. Else, if one starts campaigning at the eleventh hour, the voter will rightly ask why the NCP thinks about him only before elections. To prevent this from happening, one must start getting into the act right now,” he said.

Urging his workers not to be disheartened by the Lok Sabha results, he said that the Assembly elections were a different ball game altogether.

“A climate of hyper-patriotism was created by the BJP in the country post the Pulwama terror strike and Narendra Modi won by riding on the crest of this feeling. In contrast, the Congress was led by a youthful MP [Rahul Gandhi], ” said the NCP supremo, stressing that the people would not vote for Modi over emotive issues in the forthcoming Assembly elections.

The NCP’s defeat in the crucial Maval Lok Sabha seat (where Mr. Pawar's grand nephew Parth Pawar contested) and the party’s strategy on the Bhosari Assembly segment were also discussed in the review meet.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had comprehensively trounced the NCP in the 2017 Pimpri-Chinchwad civic poll, supplanting Mr. Pawar’s party from its erstwhile bastion in the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation.

The BJP’s PCMC win was an especially remarkable achievement as the saffron party had virtually no presence in the area until the 2014 Parliamentary polls.

The BJP’s fortunes changed dramatically when Chinchwad MLA Laxman Jagtap, formerly the NCP's strong man in the area, switched to the BJP in 2014. This paved the entry of NCP heavyweights like Bhosari legislator Mahesh Landge and former PCMC Mayor Azam Pansare into the saffron party, thus severely weakening the NCP in Pimpri-Chinchwad.

It was the role played by these NCP turncoats of the past which severely undercut Parth Pawar’s chances in the Maval LS seat – which includes Pimpri and Chinchwad - this Lok Sabha election.