The Shiv Sena on Saturday chose to play hardball with big brother BJP, pressing for a 50:50 power-sharing deal in Maharashtra and demanding a written assurance.
The Sena said such an agreement was reached between BJP chief Amit Shah and his Sena counterpart Uddhav Thackeray ahead of the Lok Sabha polls.
The demand for a written assurance was aired by a newly elected Sena member after a meeting of the party’s 56 MLAs at Matoshree, the residence of Uddhav.
“At our meeting, it was decided that as Amit Shahji had promised a 50-50 formula before the Lok Sabha polls, similarly both allies should get chance to run the government for 2.5 years each,” Pratap Sarnaik, who has been elected from Ovala-Majiwada on a Sena ticket, said after the meeting.
The Sena’s tough stance came against the backdrop of a clamour within the party to prop up Uddhav’s son Aaditya Thackeray as chief minister of Maharashtra.
“Aaditya Thackeray is the Yuva Sena president. He is a leader of the youths of Maharashtra. Today, the youths are demanding that our leader should be young and he should become chief minister,” Mahesh Shinde, the MLA from Koregaon, told NDTV.
Aaditya, 29, was the first member of the Thackeray dynasty to contest an election. He stood from the Worli seat in Mumbai and won. The decision to contest is being seen as an attempt to position him as a claimant to the chief minister’s chair.
The Shiv Sena, BJP’s oldest ally, had always been the senior partner in Maharashtra. The dynamics changed in the last Assembly polls in 2014 after the alliance broke off and the two contested separately.
Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray Prem Singh
The BJP, riding on a fresh Modi wave, bagged many more seats than the Sena. The political reality compelled the Sena to enter into a post-poll tie-up as a junior partner and form the government. The Sena now wants to avenge the past by bargaining hard, with its eye on the chief minister’s chair.
The 50-50 agreement being referred to by the Sena MLA pertains to the negotiations between the two partners ahead of the general election in May.
Shah had met Uddhav against the backdrop of the Sena threatening to go it alone in the Lok Sabha polls. After a meeting, an agreement was reached that in the Assembly polls, the BJP and Sena would contest an equal number of seats.
The two leaders, however, maintained silence on the question of the chief minister’s post. The Sena now claims there was a “verbal agreement” of 50-50 power sharing including of the chief minister’s post.
Despite the agreement to contest an equal number of seats in the Assembly polls, the BJP contested more seats than the Sena. The Sena had grudgingly accepted the seat-sharing arrangement and is now getting back, taking advantage of the BJP’s need for numbers to form the government.
BJP leaders in Delhi chose to maintain silence over the Sena’s demand but privately indicated that “there was no question of compromising on the chief minister’s post”.
A senior BJP leader said the Sena was trying to use the BJP’s dependence on its numbers to form the government to extract a “good bargain”. “They (the Sena) want plum ministerial berths,” the leader said, adding that the issue would be settled after Shah speaks to Uddhav after Diwali.
The BJP has won 105 seats and the Sena 56. In the 288-member Assembly, the simple majority mark stands at 145.
The Sena has been using whispers about talks with the Congress and the Sharad Pawar-led NCP for a possible tie-up to anoint Aaditya as chief minister.
The NCP has bagged 54 seats and the Congress 44. If the three (the Sena, Congress and the NCP) join hands along with other smaller parties, many of which are allies of the Congress-NCP, they can manage the numbers.
