Days after Ajit and Sharad Pawar revealed in interviews with Newslaundry and The News Minute that industrialist Gautam Adani either attended or hosted, or both, a high-profile NCP-BJP meeting in 2019, BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis has acknowledged the meeting but denied it took place at Adani’s residence.
Fadnavis, in an interview with The Hindu, said that the meeting took place at a “neutral venue”. “There was a meeting which took place, but it was not at Gautam Adani’s residence. Amit Shah, Sharad Pawar, Ajit Pawar, Praful Patel and I were present at the meeting. It took place in Delhi, at a neutral venue. That was the time when Uddhav Thackeray had decided that he would not join us.”
He did not comment on whether Adani was also present at the meeting.
To recap, in November 2019, Ajit Pawar made his first attempt to “split” the NCP by departing with a handful of MLAs to form a government with the BJP. Ajit was sworn in as deputy chief minister for 80 hours, after which the majority of MLAs returned to the NCP, and the alliance collapsed. He finally split the party in July 2023.
In an interview with Newslaundry and The News Minute, Sharad Pawar said that Adani hosted the high-profile meeting in 2019 at his home in Delhi.
The senior Pawar said his party colleagues, many of whom faced cases from central agencies, told him they had been assured that if they crossed over to the BJP, the cases would go away.
Pawar said he pushed back as he wasn’t convinced the BJP would keep its promise. But he agreed for the meeting to “hear it from the horse’s mouth”. He revealed more about the events leading up to the dramatic shift in Maharashtra politics in his interview with Jain.
This has thrown a renewed spotlight on Gautam Adani’s closeness to the Modi government and his role in engineering political defections.
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