Mumbai: NCP supremo Sharad Pawar has said that his decision to reject 1993 Mumbai blasts mastermind and underworld don Dawood Ibrahim's conditional offer of surrender was backed by the then prime minister P.V. Narsimha Rao.
In his autobiography, On My Terms: From the Grassroots to the Corridors of Power, Pawar says, when he was chief minister, former BJP leader and lawyer Ram Jethmalani had come to meet him with Dawood's proposal— purportedly made over the phone from London— to surrender and face trial provided the Indian government agreed to his “conditions”.
Claiming that he had no role in the serial blast, the mobster offered to surrender but wanted to be kept under house arrest.
He also had apprehensions that he might be bumped off in the jail or could be subjected to third-degree torture in police custody.
The revelation comes at a time when the Indian establishment is making fresh effort to nab the India most wanted criminal,
“I then took up the issue with Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao and he, too, concurred with our view. Since there was complete unanimity against entertaining Dawood's pre-conditions, the issue did not go any further,” the NCP chief says in the memoir.
Pawar has also pointed fingers at the Congress “first family” for instigating a section of party men to speak up against him, thickening the “cloud of suspicion” about his links with the underworld kingpin, India's most-wanted man, who is believed to be hiding in Pakistan.
The former Maharashtra CM also claims that the Pakistani military had instructed their collaborators in Mumbai to “eliminate” him (Pawar) because of his success in preventing communal riots in the city following the deadly bombings that killed over 350 people.
The former union ministe also claimed that Sonia gandhi did not let him become Prime Minister in 1991, he has come out with details of how she had preferred P V Narasimha Rao to him in 1991 because she did not want “someone with an independent mind” to be the prime minister and how their relationship lacked “warmth”.
Pawar, who parted ways with the Congress in 1999 after opposing Sonia's projection as PM candidate because of her foreign origin, writes that she brought back P V Narasimha Rao from retirement to become the PM.
He enumerates a number of instances when as Leader of the Congress group in the Lok Sabha he was constantly undermined by Sonia in her capacity as Congress President during 1996-97.
His book, titled Life on My Terms — From the Grassroots to the Corridors of Power, was formally released Thursday — which also happened to be his 75th birthday — at a function attended by political bigwigs including Sonia, the Prime Minister, the President and the Vice-President.
