Addressing a press conference here, Munde charged that Pawar's party was nothing but a "defectors' party." He said Pawar's dream to capture power in the State with the help of ``politically motivated defectors'' would never come true.

The Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) alliance would retain power in the State with a clear majority and also repeat its 1996 Lok Sabha performance in next month's Parliamentary elections as well as State Assembly polls, the senior BJP leader claimed.

``They had defeated the united Congress in the last Assembly elections and now the Congress party is vertically split,'' he said and expressed confidence that neither the NCP nor the Congress posed any challenge to the saffron alliance. The Sonia Gandhi-led Congress had nearly disappeared from the State, Munde claimed and observed that in western Maharashtra there would be a contest between the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance and NCP candidates, while in the Vidharba region the contest would be between the Congress and the saffron alliance.

Munde, who also holds the home portfolio, criticised Sonia's reported statement that the minority communities were not being protected in Maharashtra and Gujarat. He described the allegations as baseless and made by a person with ''low political knowledge'' and pointed out that the state was free from any communal riots during the saffron alliance rule.

Munde denied that there was any deal between BJP and NCP to topple the Shiv Sena in the elections. He said that the alliance government would adopt the plank of stable and able government in the state as well as at the Centre during the election campaign, which the alliance government had proved during their four-and-a-half year tenure in the state.