Terribly afraid over what PM Modi will do next: Sharad Pawar

Mumbai, Apr 20: NCP chief Sharad Pawar said on Saturday that he was "terribly afraid" as to what Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who once called Pawar his mentor in politics, would do next.

Pawar was addressing a campaign rally at Daund in Baramati Lok Sabha constiutency from where his daughter Supriya Sule is seeking re-election.

"Modi says he came into politics holding my finger. But now I am terribly afraid, because what this man will do, nobody knows," the former Union minister said.

PM Modi had said he came into politics "holding Pawar's finger" while sharing a dais with the NCP chief at a function in Pune district in 2016.

Pawar, as a senior minister in the UPA government, always helped him when he took up matters related to Gujarat with the centre, PM Modi had said.

At the rally Saturday, Pawar noted that BJP chief Amit Shah recently visited Baramati and Union minister Smriti Irani was scheduled to address a public meeting in the constituency.

Why "the entire country" was interested in visiting the place, he wondered.

In the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls, Shah had vowed to snatch Baramati from the NCP this time.

The BJP is asking what the UPA government did, but it fails to answer what it did in the ten years it was in power, Pawar further said.

"Modi held seven (election) rallies in Maharashtra and the issue at all those rallies was Sharad Pawar," he said, referring to the prime minister's frequent swipes at him.

He also said that while he himself never did politics on agricultural issues, the BJP-led governments at the centre and in the state did not create a good industrial set-up for the sugar sector.

PTI