Union minister Narayan Rane had said that he would have slapped Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray over the latter’s ignorance of the year of India’s Independence. It was a remark that triggered a massive political row and protests in the State and led to the Union Minister’s arrest. The Shiv Sena of Chief Minister Thackeray, a party where Rane spent four decades, did not take kindly to the remark and hit back with references to the time the Union Minister ran a poultry shop in Mumbai.
Rane has had a colourful political journey that began with the Shiv Sena as a councillor and then to State politics and even Chief Minister of Maharashtra, but was expelled from the party and joined the Congress. He held important positions in the Congress was a minister in the State government but later was expelled from the party, inducted back and then quit it to start the Maharashtra Swabhiman Paksha. He then merged that party into the Bharatiya Janata Party and was inducted into the Modi ministry just recently in July. He is the first union minister to be arrested in 20 years.
Rane’s arrest is the latest flashpoint between the Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party, that were once strong allies but parted ways in November 2019 after the Maharashtra State elections that returned a hung House and Shiv Sena teamed up with the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party to form a government. Until that time, the Shiv Sena was the BJP’s oldest ally. Relations since that day have changed and the latest spat has only worsened them. The BJP at the national level has called the arrest unconstitutional and said they will neither be scared nor suppressed, at the local level the leaders have called it ‘Taliban rule’.
This, however, is not the first time that Rane has been at loggerheads with Thackeray. In 2003 when Thackeray was appointed executive president of the Shiv Sena, Rane had protested it and even challenged the former, leading to his expulsion from the party in 2005. He had again criticised Thackeray earlier in 2017 when he had said that Thackeray did not understand politics. At that time Thackeray was not Chief Minister, but was the working president of the Shiv Sena and Rane was not Union Minister. With both now in positions of power the situation is far different as it involves a Union Minister and a Chief Minister of a State giving a different dimension to the spat.
The clashes between the parties will set the tone for the Brihamumbai Municipal Corporation elections that are due in February. This had already attracted interest, as they will be Maharashtra capital’s first polls after the Shiv Sena and Bharatiya Janata Party parted ways. There are about 12 municipal councils in Maharashtra that will go to the polls early next year and after the falling out with the Shiv Sena, the polls will be an opportunity for the Bharatiya Janata Party to recapture the vote share they have ceded in the last State Assembly elections. If they manage wins in the municipal councils it will give the BJP the bragging rights to claim they were robbed of opportunity to form the government.
Maharashtra politics have just been stirred by a remark that could have been best ignored by the State’s ruling dispensation but the friction that had begun when the BJP and the Sena parted ways led to it being ignited again. Rane got bail hours after the arrest, but the acrimony between the two parties is now unlikely to end anytime soon. It could spill over in the local elections.
