Congress President Sharad Pawar meets PM Modi

On Saturday, National Congress Party (NCP) President, Sharad Pawar met Prime Minister Narendra Modi at his residence for nearly an hour. The meeting between Pawar and PM Modi assumes significance as it took place between the three-cornered alliance formed by Shiv Sena, National Congress Party and 

Congress within the Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition government in Maharashtra. After meeting the Prime Minister, Pawar said, "no politics was discussed between the two." This was also the first one-on-one meeting of the NCP chief with PM Modi since 2019. 

In a statement released after his meeting, Pawar said that he pointed out "certain inconsistencies" and the resulting legal inefficacy of normative provisions of the Banking Regulation Act. 

As reported by Times of India, in his letter, Pawar said the "incorporation, regulation and winding up of cooperative banks should be the exclusive domain of the states and not the Reserve Bank of India. The various sections introduced to amend the Banking Regulation Act are beyond the legislative competence of Parliament and void under Article (123)(3) of the Constitution. He added, "the powers bestowed on RBI to deal with matters pertaining to issuance and refund of share capital, appointment or disqualification of directors, constitution of board of management, appointment of CEO, audit obligations, etc can be construed as excessive regulation".

Over the past few days, Sharad Pawar has held back-to-back meetings with Union ministers; Firstly, the newly-appointed Leader of the House in Rajya Sabha Piyush Goyal met Pawar at his residence in Delhi ahead of the monsoon session of Parliament. After this, Pawar met Defense Minister Rajnath Singh on Friday. It is worth noting that Maharashtra Chief Minister and Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray met the Prime Minister in Delhi last month.