Union Minister Arrested by Maharashtra Police, All Hell Breaks out Between BJP and Shiv Sena

Manas Dasgupta

NEW DELHI, Aug 24: The strong political rivalry between the two erstwhile comrades-in-arms, the BJP and the ruling Shiv Sena, has taken a turn for the worse with the Sena government putting the union minister Narayan Rane under arrest for using some abusive terms against the Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray.

Rane, who was inducted in the Narendra Modi cabinet during the mega reshuffle of the union ministry last month as minister for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, was on Tuesday arrested and taken into custody from Sangameshwar by the Ratnagiri police.

The arrest was affected after the Bombay High Court turned his plea for relief and told him to follow the due procedures before approaching it. He had moved the court seeking to quash the four FIRs against him which were filed in different places for saying that he would have “slapped Uddhav Thackeray for forgetting the number of years of India’s Independence during flag-hoisting on August 15 if he was present at the spot.” Earlier in the day, before the High Court, even a court in Ratnagiri district in the Konkan region had rejected his anticipatory bail plea.

The FIRs were registered against the former Chief Minister in Pune by the Yuva Sena (the Shiv Sena’s youth wing), one in Nashik and two at Mahad in Raigad district. Rane moved the High Court through advocate Aniket Nikam, challenging the FIRs registered in Mahad (Raigad), Pune, and Nashik. He has also sought protection from coercive action, including arrest pending hearing of the plea.

The Shiv Sena and BJP workers clashed on the streets in Mumbai after Rane’s comment. Sena supporters protested in Solapur, where they blackened Rane’s photo, garlanded it with chappals and hit his picture with footwear. Shiv Sainiks also vandalised the BJP’s office in Nashik and agitations are believed to have broken out in Baramati, Nagpur and Sangli.

A vitriolic critic of the Sena and Thackeray, Rane had made the remarks during his ‘Jan Ashirwad Yatra’, which he launched last week against the ruling Maha Vikas Aghadi government.

High drama was seen in Ratnagiri when the Sangameshwar police went to arrest him, triggering heated altercations between the Minister’s aides and the authorities.

“What crime has Rane committed. This is a lawless State…we told the Superintendent of Police that we are ready to come down to the jail if the police had a proper warrant. But the police claim they are under tremendous pressure. Is this rule by law or goonda raj,” asked Pramod Jathar, BJP leader from the Konkan.

The offensive quote of Rane included a series of charges he leveled against the Thackeray government in coalition with the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress, also Rane’s former party. During the course of his address, Rane said, “The State’s economy and all businesses are in turmoil owing to this man [Mr. Thackeray] pathetic management of affairs…more than 1.5 lakh persons have lost their lives due to the State’s mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. There was a shortage of vaccines, no medical staff, no doctors. The State’s health infrastructure was in a shambolic state… Does he [Mr. Thackeray] even have the right to speak on anything… He ought to keep a secretary as he did not even know it was the 75th anniversary of India’s Independence and was asking someone backstage [on Independence Day]. I would have given him a tight slap had I been there for forgetting the number of years of India’s Independence”.

While BJP Leader of the Opposition and former Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis admitted that Rane ought to have shown restraint in his statements, State BJP president Chandrakant Patil said it was “against protocol” for a State government to arrest a Union Minister.

“All this arrest drama has been contrived by the Maha Vikas Aghadi government to divert the public’s attention from the fact that Rane has been receiving overwhelming support in the Konkan region during his ‘Jan Ashirwad Yatra’,” Patil claimed.

Rane’s flamboyant style of speech was nothing new. Even in the past, he had allegedly called Thackeray a chor (thief) when the latter was not the Chief Minister.

“I wonder who is advising the Chief Minister to do all this… As far as maintaining the decorum of the post is concerned, we [the BJP], too, have a long list of how those holding government and legislative posts have misused and abused power to support their respective parties… It is not a question of justifying Rane’s remark. But then ‘derogatory’ remarks made by leaders from the three ruling coalition parties have gone unnoticed without inviting any action…this is not fair,” Patil added.

The induction of Rane in the Union Cabinet last month during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s mega-reshuffle is being viewed as an aggressive move on the BJP’s part to neutralise the Sena in the Konkan. Himself a former Shiv Sainik and an important face of the Maratha community, Rane’s ‘Sena baiting’ has grown even more strident since he exited the Congress in 2017.

However, his entry into the BJP had not been smooth and was a bone of contention when the BJP and the Sena were in alliance in the erstwhile Devendra Fadnavis government.

The Konkan strongman had accused the Sena of deliberately delaying his entry in the BJP given the mutual antipathy between himself and Thackeray.

In September 2017, Rane had severed his decade plus-long association with the Congress with the expectation that the BJP, which then was weak in the Konkan belt, would welcome him with open arms. At the time of his exit, he had vowed to deplete the ranks of his former parties, the Sena and the Congress.

In the interim until the present moment, Rane, who at one time believed that he would be the “Sena face” after the founder-leader Balasaheb Thackeray, Uddhav’s father, has repeatedly launched vitriolic attacks on Thackeray, berating the latter’s capabilities as party head and then as Chief Minister.

Rane, who ruled his fiefdom of Kudal in Sindhudurg district which he held for six terms as MLA, had been comprehensively trounced by the Sena’s Vaibhav Naik in the 2014 Assembly elections – a defeat he has neither forgotten nor forgiven.