Mumbai: A year and a half after Eknath Shinde rebelled against the Shiv Sena party and took away 40 MLAs along with him, Maharashtra legislative assembly speaker Rahul Narwekar declared Shinde’s front to be the “real Shiv Sena” on Wednesday (January 10).
While Shinde, a senior Shiv Sena leader considered to be a party loyalist until his rebellion, will get to retain the party’s symbol, Narwekar refrained from disqualifying the MLAs from Uddhav Thackeray’s (UBT) faction.
Narwekar’s decision, which was pending for nearly 18 months and even attracted the Supreme Court’s ire, was on 34 different petitions filed by MLAs from both factions. In all, the legitimacy of 54 MLAs from both factions was questioned in these petitions.
On Wednesday, Narwekar refused to disqualify MLAs from either faction.
Addressing a press conference in Mumbai, Thackeray questioned the speaker’s decision and said that if Shinde’s faction is legitimate, the speaker should have disqualified his (Thackeray’s) group.
“However, that did not happen. This is a clear ploy to kill democracy in Maharashtra,” he said, adding that his party will challenge the speaker’s decision in the Supreme Court.
Thackeray’s faction had contended that as the then-Sena’s party head, his was the final word.
However, Narwekar decided on Wednesday that since as many as 37 out of the party’s 55 elected members had rebelled against him, Thackeray could not be considered the party chief.
The speaker held that since Shinde had the mandate of a majority of the party’s MLAs at that time, he automatically assumed the role of the “paksh pramukh” or the party leader and that Thackeray did not have the power to remove Shinde from that role.
The Thackeray faction was relying on a 2018 amendment to the party’s constitution. However, as there was no organisational election held that year and the 2018 amendment was not in the records of the Election Commission of India, the speaker held the party’s 1999 constitution was the legitimate one.
While in 2018, the party considered the paksh pramukh as its highest office, its 1999 constitution said the national executive was the highest party body.
As per the 1999 rule, the paksh pramukh had to take party decisions in consultation with the national executive.
Shinde’s exit from the party was a dramatic one. He had suddenly gone ‘incommunicado’ and was later found with 37 MLAs in a hotel in Guwahati in Assam, a BJP-ruled state. From here, he and fellow rebel MLAs moved to Gujarat and then to Goa, both again BJP states, before finally returning to Mumbai.
Shinde had accused Thackeray of high-handedness and of losing touch with the Sena’s Hindutva vision. His displeasure with the Sena soon proved to be a political opportunity, with him joining hands with the BJP and also becoming the state’s chief minister.
The BJP’s front runner and former chief minister Devendra Fadnavis had to settle for the deputy chief minister’s position.
Later, after Shinde became chief minister, many Sena leaders, including those considered very close to the Thackeray family, joined his faction.
Months later, a similar story played out in the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), with Ajit Pawar and many senior MLAs of the party joining hands with Shinde’s faction and the BJP.
Now, Ajit Pawar too is the state’s deputy chief minister.
The speaker’s decision came after several reminders and petitions by the UBT faction.
The Supreme Court has since May last year been directing Narwekar to expeditiously decide on the applications by the two factions. The apex court had earlier set December 31, 2023 as the deadline for him to decide on the disqualification applications and later shifted it to January 10.
The court had, in strong words, expressed dissatisfaction at the speaker’s inexplicable delay in the adjudication of the applications. The court had said that “the dignity of this court’s judgement should be maintained”, legal news website LiveLaw reported.
The Election Commission last year gave the ‘Shiv Sena’ name and its ‘bow-and-arrow’ symbol to the Shinde-led faction, while the one headed by Thackeray was called the Shiv Sena (UBT), with a flaming torch as its symbol.
Narwekar’s decision today comes as the second jolt to Thackeray. The challenge before him now is to keep his party (of 16 MLAs) together, right before the 2024 general elections.
While refusing to disqualify the 40 MLAs of Shinde’s faction, Narwekar said that as soon as Shinde and his MLAs walked out, the party’s chief whip Sunil Prabhu had “no authority” to call a meeting of the legislature party.
The Thackeray faction had sought the disqualification of MLAs from Shinde’s faction on the grounds that they did not attend the legislature party meeting called by then-chief whip Prabhu on June 21.
However, by then, the Shinde-led faction had passed a resolution appointing Bharatshet Gogawale as chief whip.
Thackeray’s party MP Sanjay Raut called Narwekar a “traitor” and said that a “Marathi manoos” (Marathi person) has backstabbed the citizens of Maharashtra. “This is a short-lived victory,” he said.
Shinde, on the other hand, called it a “people’s mandate” as the majority of the erstwhile party’s MLAs were by his side.