Relief for Thackeray Camp: Bombay High Court Directs BMC to Accept Rutuja Latke’s Resignation

Manas Dasgupta

NEW DELHI, Oct 13: Providing a huge relief to the Thackeray faction, the Bombay high court on Thursday directed the Mumbai municipal corporation to accept the resignation of its employee Rutuja Latke by 11 A.M. on Friday to enable her to file her nominations to contest the Andheri East Maharashtra Assembly by-elections.

Ms Latke, widow of the Shiv Sena sitting MLA Ramesh Latke, whose death earlier this year caused the by-poll, was nominated by the Thackeray faction to contest the seat as the candidate of the now named “Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray)” party with “mashaal” as its election symbol. Being an employee of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, Ms Latke could not file her nomination till her resignation was accepted but BMC kept playing truant.

With Friday the last date for filling nominations for the seat for the November 3 by-elections, the BMC municipal commissioner Iqbal Chahal told her on Wednesday that a decision on her resignation would be taken within the rules of 30 days required notice period. The civic body chief had insisted on taking his time, arguing that under the rules, he has a month to make his decision know. To the Thackeray camp accusations that the officer was acting under pressures from the chief minister Eknath Shinde, denied of any political pressure.

Chahal’s evasive stand forced Ms Latke to rush to the High Court for necessary directive. The High Court while asking the civic body to give its letter of acceptance by 11 am tomorrow, rebuked Chahal questioning why the Municipal Commissioner was “not using his discretion and taking a decision.”

“If an employee wants to resign and contest elections, what is the difficulty? The petitioner is a clerk… It is just an employer-employee dispute… This is not even a matter that should have come to court. The Commissioner should have done it by now,” said the bench of Justices Nitin Jamdar and Sharmila Deshmukh.

“We have to see the totality of the circumstances. It is a resignation letter, it is a clerical staff who wants to resign, just say yes or no, don’t give it so much importance. Don’t burden us, we already have many matters pending. Why is it given so much importance? You just have to inform them whether it is accepted or not. Unfortunately, it has come to us,” added the bench.

The Thackeray faction said Rutuja Latke had initially resigned on September 2 but after keeping it pending for 20 days, Chahal rejected it on September 22 because of “some glitch in paper works” and asked her to submit a fresh resignation letter but the BMC had been since evasive about accepting it.

Even in court on Thursday, the civic body had insisted that it would take a decision before 30 days, citing a departmental inquiry into corruption charges against her. “She never used to attend the office while working. She used to work only for liaison,” the civic body had argued. Calling the civic body’s argument a ruse, Mrs Latke argued that it was a “malafide complaint and being done based on someone else’s guidance.”

Even as the drama over her candidature was unfolding in the court of law, the Thackeray faction accused the Election Commission of “biased” towards the Shinde faction in the allocation of party symbols and names.

In a four-page letter to the poll body, the Thackeray camp charged the ECI of ‘revealing’ its strategy to the Shinde camp by uploading a copy of a confidential letter sent by the Uddhav camp containing the possible party name and symbol alternatives to be used in the upcoming Andheri East by-election even before Mr. Shinde’s group had submitted his own list.

In the letter, which ticks of the ECI on 12 points, the Thackeray faction has claimed that the ECI’s “intentionally uploading” of their confidential letter on the website helped the Shinde group to decode its strategy. “Otherwise, how did the Shinde group give the same [party symbol and name] options as us? Further, to the surprise of the respondent [Thackeray faction], it was seen that the Hon’ble Commission thereafter deleted this letter from its website. Needless to say, no letter of the petitioner [Shinde group] stating his preference of symbols and names was ever uploaded on the [ECI] website,” said the letter, which was handed to the ECI by the Thackeray group’s lawyer.

Earlier this week on Monday, after hectic deliberation, the ECI had allotted the ‘flaming torch’ ( mashaal) symbol to the Thackeray faction while rejecting the Shinde group’s proposed symbols alternatives – of which two, the ‘trident’ and the ‘rising sun’ had been submitted by the Thackeray camp as well. The ECI on Tuesday finally accepted the ‘two swords and a shield’ symbol submitted by the Eknath Shinde faction.

While the poll body had allotted new faction names for the rival camps, one of the proposed names – Shivsena (Balasaheb Thackeray), which had first been submitted by the Thackeray group, was later submitted by the Shinde camp as well. The letter further alleged that the Shinde camp had “tellingly” given the first choice of party name as submitted by the Thackeray group to the ECI, as well as the first and second choices of party symbol given by them.

Given the overlap, this led to the ECI effectively not allotting to the Thackeray camp its first choice of party name and prime preferences for the party symbol, alleged the letter. The letter has also sought an assurance from the ECI that such ‘biases’ in favour of the Eknath Shinde faction will not continue in the future and that both groups will be given the same preference.