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Had electoral, moral mandate, says Ravi Shankar Prasad
In a surprise move on Saturday morning, BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis and NCP’s Ajit Pawar were sworn in as chief minister and deputy chief minister.
The Bharatiya Janata Party on Saturday defended its move to stake its claim to forming government in Maharashtra with a Nationalist Congress Party splinter group, asserting that the “moral and electoral” mandate had been for the BJP-Shiv Sena combine with Devendra Fadnavis as chief minister.
Union law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad lashed out at the opposition for trying to cobble together a Shiv Sena-led government and dubbed it a “conspiracy to control the financial capital through the backdoor”.
In a surprise move on Saturday morning, BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis and NCP’s Ajit Pawar were sworn in as chief minister and deputy chief minister. On Friday, the Sena-Congress-NCP combine had announced they would stake claim to forming the next government in the state with Uddhav Thackeray as the CM.
Maharashtra has been under President’s Rule since November 12, after no single party emerged with a majority on its own in the October 21 elections. The BJP and Sena, who had fought the elections in an alliance and together had a majority in the 288-member assembly, parted ways after the latter insisted on an equal sharing of power and rotational chief ministership, which the former refused to concede.
Asked how many NCP legislators, along with Ajit Pawar, had signed a letter of support for the BJP-led government, Prasad said both leaders, as heads of their respective legislative parties, offered letters of support of their MLAs. He did not specify a number. The alliance has until November 30 to prove it has a majority.
“The correct place to prove the majority is Vidhan Sabha and we’ll prove it there,” he said.
“The governor had no counter-claim by any other party or alliance,” he said.
On the Congress’s allegation that the alliance between the BJP and the NCP was tantamount to murder of democracy, Prasad said, “They are saying today that democracy has been murdered, how is that? If the Sena breaks its alliance of 30 years, is it not murder of democracy…It was a conspiracy to control the financial capital of country through the backdoor.”
He said questions must be asked why the Sena had become “so excited” after the results were declared on October 24 and why, when both NCP leader Sharad Pawar and the Congress had said that they had the mandate to sit in the Opposition, they agreed to form a government with Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray as CM.
The senior BJP leader also hit out at the Sena for taking an adversarial position against the government even though it had been a partner of the BJP for 30 years. “I don’t want to say anything about those who can’t keep alive the principles of Bala Saheb. It was his ideologies and principles that brought both the parties (Shiv Sena and BJP) together,” he said, referring to late Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray, and his son and successor Uddhav without naming him.
