Aurangabad : A rift between two factions of the NCP came to the fore after a local leader of the party, Vinod Patil, indulged in a heated exchange of words with the former higher and technical education minister, Rajesh Tope, and the verbal duel was led to the former assaulting the latter.
The high drama was witnessed at the Aurangabad airport minutes after the party president, Sharad Pawar, flew to Mumbai on Sunday evening. Tope is the in-charge of the NCP in Aurangabad district while Patil is the city president of the party and a trusted man of MLC Satish Chavan, a legislator from the Marathwada graduate constituency for the second consecutive term. According to sources who were present at the airport and witnessed the high drama in person, Pawar along with some other senior leaders of his party reached the Aurangabad airport, after completing the tour of Marathwada, at 5 pm and left for Mumbai by a flight at 5.45 pm.
Thousands of NCP activists and leaders from Aurangabad turned up at the airport to bid farewell to their party supremo. They included Patil and Abhishek Deshmukh. Minutes after Pawar flew for Mumbai, they indulged in a heated exchange with Tope and squarely blamed him first for the party’s debacle in the Assembly elections and later for the miserable performance in the civic polls. They also accused Tope of not caring for the kith and kin of late NCP leader R R Patil and said that he paid no attention to the party during the civic elections held in April 2015. This was converted into a scuffle between Tope on one side and Patil and Deshmukh on the other. Other leaders of the party leaped into the scuffle and saved Tope from the clutches of the duo.
When contacted for his version of the incident, Tope refuted the manhandling incident and said that nothing like that happened with him.
Sudhir Dharmadhikari
