Symbol duel: Sangma (top), Pawar

New Delhi, Jan. 27: Three days after the Nationalist Congress Party split, the Sharad Pawar and P.A. Sangma factions today knocked on the doors of Nirvachan Sadan, staking claim to the undivided party’s flag and clock symbol.

Aware of breakaway leader Sangma’s plan to approach the Election Commission to claim the NCP’s flag and symbol, a delegation of the Pawar group filed a caveat before the poll panel early this morning.

The team, led by party general secretary Pitambar Master, urged the commission to listen to the Pawar-led NCP before reaching any verdict on Sangma’s impending plea.

Within hours, the Sangma faction formally submitted an application to the commission. The representation explained Sangma’s election as NCP chief, replacing Pawar, at a “convention” of party workers on Saturday.

Sangma went on to assert that since the party under his leadership represented the NCP’s core ideology of barring persons of foreign origin from occupying high constitutional posts, his faction was the legal claimant to the flag and the clock symbol.

Sangma told reporters in the afternoon that his group was the original NCP, which enjoyed an “overwhelming majority” of party office-bearers, MPs and MLAs.

The spokesman of the Pawar faction, Praful Patel, contested the claim at a separate news briefing. He also contradicted the former Lok Sabha speaker’s charge that the NCP, under Pawar, had changed its stand on the foreign origin issue.

Pawar initiated alliance talks with the Sonia Gandhi-led Congress without changing the NCP’s position on the foreign origin issue, he said. The leadership of the alliance, Patel said, would be decided after the parliamentary polls. Sonia had said so in Mumbai some time ago, he emphasised.

“The Congress knows our stand and ideology. We have not informed them that there is any change in it (foreign origin issue),” Patel added. He accused Sangma of playing the politics of opportunism even though the former speaker was party to last year’s NCP resolution that authorised Pawar to talk with other secular parties on pre-poll deals.