Maharashtra political crisis: Sharad Pawar calls core committee meeting in Pune on Sunday, to meet Sonia Gandhi on Monday now

New Delhi: The meeting between Congress interim president Sonia Gandhi and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar, which was scheduled to take place on Sunday, has been postponed for Monday. According to sources, Pawar will first meet the leaders of the core committee on Sunday and then fly to New Delhi for meeting with Sonia, wherein the two parties will decide the next course of action pertaining to Maharashtra political crisis. 

The core committee meeting will be held at Pawar's Pune residence at 4 pm and he is expected to take a flight to Delhi in the night.

At the meeting, Sonia and Pawar are also likely to take a final call on the draft Common Minimum Programme (CMP) agreed by their respective parties and the Shiv Sena for the proposed coalition government in Maharashtra.

Shiv Sena, after a bitter tussle with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is bent on having a non-BJP government in Maharashtra and the three parties are having talks for government formation. 

"Congress alone can't decide things. Pawar and Sonia Gandhi will sit together and discuss the next course of action. They will decide how to solve this problem. Only after that, the other actions will follow," Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge, also in-charge for Maharashtra, said on Friday. 

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He also added that once the two leaders sit and discuss, only then will the political strategy be prepared. 

The Congress and the NCP fought the Maharashtra assembly polls together. The BJP emerged as the single-largest party in the state with 105 seats in 288-member assembly followed by Shiv Sena 56, NCP 54 and Congress 44. 

After none of the parties could form government in Maharashtra, President's Rule was imposed in the state on November 12.  

Meanwhile, Congress, NCP and Shiv Sena's meeting with Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari was also postponed on Saturday till further notice. A delegation of the three parties was to meet Governor Koshyari to discuss farmers' issue. However, speculations were high that they will jointly stake claim to form the government. After which, Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan and NCP leader Nawab Malik, while talking to news agency ANI, cleared that the meeting between their delegation and the governor is over the farmers' issues only and has nothing to do with staking claim to form government in the state.