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‘ED, ED’ shouts in Maharashtra assembly in protest against rebel MLA. Watch
Maharashtra assembly speaker election: BJP's Rahul Nawrekar is the new assembly speaker.
The Uddhav Thackeray government may have collapsed but it seems the MLAs in his team don’t want to give up a chance to register their displeasure over the turn of events. On Sunday, as the state assembly held the first session after Eknath Shinde’s revolt unfolded and he finally took over as the chief minister, slogans of “ED, ED” rent the air when an MLA who had switched sides registered her headcount amid voting for the new assembly speaker.
In a video tweeted by news agency ANI, Yamini Yashwant Jadhav is seen registering her headcount amid shouting from the opposition leaders. This was when voting was going on for the new assembly speaker - the BJP's Rahul Nawrekar was finally elected.
Yamini Jadhav and her husband, Yashwant Jadhav, are among the 38 Sena MLAs who have switched loyalties to the Shinde camp, leading to the fall of the Maha Vikas Aghadi government in 2.5 years.
Yashwant Jadhav, former chairman of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) standing committee, was recently summoned by the Enforcement Directorate over alleged violations of the Foreign Exchange Management Act.
Last week, Yamini Jadhav had released a video after Uddhav Thackeray said he could not regularly meet his party’s MLAs because he was not well. Inaccessibility of the chief minister was said to be one of the many grouses of the breakaway faction.
Explaining why she had joined the rebel camp, Yamini Jadhav said she had been suffering from cancer since October last year but the party leadership did not care about her. The video was put out by Shinde.
Amid the rebellion, which spanned 11 days, Shiv Sena’s Sanjay Raut has said several times that the MLAs switched sides over the fear of probe by central agencies. On Saturday, he said he had also got an invite to join the faction but refused. Raut appeared before the ED this week over a money laundering case linked to a development project.
Meanwhile, a two-day special session of the assembly began on Sunday. Shinde is expected to face the floor test on Monday.
(With inputs from ANI)
