Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, July 19: After losing the control of his legislative party and ousted from power, the former Maharashtra chief minister and Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray is under threat of losing a sizeable number of his party’s Members of Parliament to his one-time close friend Eknath Shinde, the incumbent chief minister.
Coinciding with the current visit to Delhi by Shinde for discussions with the BJP leadership on the formation of the Maharashtra cabinet, a dozen Shiv Sena MPs are in touch with the chief minister and may form a separate group in the Lok Sabha.
With the monsoon session of Parliament beginning on Monday, 12 Sena MPs wrote to Speaker Om Birla informing him about the separate Sena group to be led by the party’s Mumbai South Central MP Rahul Shewale. The group may also appoint a chief whip; Yavatmal MP Bhavana Gawli is likely to take that job. Shewale, however, claimed the move was not to split the party but “only to elect a new leader” in place of Vinayak Raut.
Another letter from the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena, which claims to be the original Shiv Sena, has reached the Speaker’s office removing Gawli from the post of chief whip and replacing her with Rajan Vichare. The letter written by Shiv Sena leader in the Lok Sabha, Vinayak Raut, said Vichare will be the party’s chief whip. Gawli was recently removed as Chief Whip by Thackeray for her alleged anti-party activities.
A BJP spokesman claimed that not 12, the Shinde faction of Sena would have at least 14 MPs in the group. The Speaker has not given any official decision so far nor has he yet okayed Thackeray removing Bhavana Gawli as the chief whip. The Shiv Sena has 19 MPs in Lok Sabha, 18 from Maharashtra.
Sources in the Shinde Sena claimed that these 12 MPs attended a virtual meeting with Eknath Shinde on Monday and extended their support while expressing their faith and confidence in the rebel leader whose faction now dominates the party founded by Bal Thackeray, Uddhav Thackeray’s father.
The MPs will lay claim to the Shiv Sena’s official symbol only after the Speaker decides on their request to be recognized as a separate group. Most MLAs of the Shiv Sena joined Eknath Shinde last month, bringing down Thackeray’s coalition government. Shinde formed a government with the BJP, which powered his successful coup against his party chief.
The MPs’ moved for a separate group despite Thackeray giving in to their pressure last week and broke with his hitherto allies to declare support to the BJP’s presidential candidate Droupadi Murmu though he was one of those to set up the joint opposition candidate against her Yashwant Sinha. Opposition parties said Thackeray, beaten and isolated, had little choice but to agree with his MPs.
Commenting on the move to form a separate group in the Lok Sabha, the Sena MP Arvind Sawant, still firmly in a stunted Team Thackeray, said the MPs who switch to the rival faction led by Shinde would be “violating the Constitution.” Sawant acknowledged the rebels’ strength that may help skirt the anti-defection law — “about two-third MPs” — but said Team Thackeray had the “moral and legal position” in its favour. “These MPs have acted in a manner that’s unconstitutional and unethical,” he said.
“Even if they have the required strength as per law… Yes, they will not be disqualified; but they do not become the party itself. The rules are that they have to merge with another party if they want to continue as members,” he stressed, “This is why what has happened in Maharashtra assembly, too, is wrong.”
He said the Centre’s ruling BJP, which backed Shinde, was holding the strings: “Everyone knows why these people are leaving us. There’s a threat of the Enforcement Directorate (central anti-corruption agency). There are lucrative offers. They are doing everything.”
Thackeray and Shinde are now waiting for the Supreme Court’s decision on multiple cases related to the Shiv Sena revolt, which may or may not settle the question of who’s the boss of the Shiv Sena. As the math stands now, the Shinde faction dominates the party founded by Uddhav Thackeray’s father, Bal Thackeray. Most of the MLAs are already with Eknath Shinde, and now he is moving towards taking the MPs away.
As to who’s the real Shiv Sena, that’s the nub of multiple legal battles. Breaking away the majority of MLAs and MPs gives the Shinde camp a leg-up inside legislative Houses. But it will have to gather support within the party units, too, before it can walk away with the bow and arrow symbol of Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena.
By reversing a decision of the previous three-party Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government and going for direct elections for heading the local self-government bodies, the Shinde-BJP government has apparently eyed to destabilise the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party at the grass-root levels where the two parties continue to have hold.
The Shinde-BJP government announced last week that presidents of nagar panchayats and nagar parishads, and sarpanchs of gram panchayats, would be elected directly, instead of by members of the respective local bodies. The BJP-Sena government led by Devendra Fadnavis had in 2018 first announced direct election to these bodies, overruling protests by the Congress and NCP. When the MVA government came in a year later, it had reversed this.
With 45% of its population urban, Maharashtra has 28 municipal corporations and 226 municipal councils. In the rural area, there are zilla parishads, gram samitis, and gram panchayats – 34 Zilla Parishad , 351 samitis and 28,813 panchayats in all. Elections to the local bodies, held every five years, are due this year.
