Mumbai, Oct 3 :A week after a political crisis threatened to bring down the Maharashtra government due to a rift with NCP, Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi Wednesday and discussed issues concerning the state, official sources said.
Singh and Chavan met for an hour and they discussed various “developmental issues concerning the state,” an aide to the chief minister said in Mumbai this evening.
This was Chavan's first foray to the capital after a political crisis engulfed the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) coalition in the state following the abrupt resignation of deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar last Tuesday.
It was followed by the resignations of all the 19 NCP ministers in the state cabinet, putting a question mark on the government's survival.
However, the issue was resolved amicably after NCP chief Sharad Pawar accepted his nephew Ajit Pawar's resignation Sep 28 and ordered all other ministers to get back to work.
Thursday, Chavan will hold the first formal cabinet meeting after the ‘resignation drama' of last week, but minus the deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar.
Incidentally, in an apparent bid to exhibit his influence in the party circles, Ajit Pawar held a meeting with a majority of the NCP ministers this evening in Mumbai.
Home Minister R.R. Patil, PWD Minister Chhagan Bhujbal, Jayant Patil and others were present at the meeting, details of which were not immediately available.
Pawar, 53, had abruptly quit the state cabinet Sep 25 amid allegations of arbitrarily doling out irrigation contracts worth over Rs. 20,000 crore, when he was the water resources minister between 1999-2009.
