Ending the two-month-old split with the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Shiv Sena on Friday formally joined the Maharashtra State government. Ten of Sena’s MLAs were sworn in as ministers in the oath taking ceremony held at the State assembly premises.
Sena’s Divakar Raote, Subhash Desai, Ramdas Kadam, Eknath Shinde and Dr. Dipak Sawant were sworn in as cabinet ministers. While Sanjay Rathod, DadaBhuse, Vijay Shivtare, Deepak Kesarkar and Ravindra Waikar took the oath as ministers of state.
BJP’s Girish Bapat, Girish Mahajan, Chandrashekhar Bawankule, Babanrao Lonikar and Rajkumar Badole were sworn in as the cabinet ministers at the first cabinet expansion of newly formed Devendra Fadnavis government. BJP’s Ram Shinde, Vijay Deshmukh, Amberishrao Atram, Ranjit Patil and Pravin Pote will be the new ministers of State.
The Sena will be given two more MoS portfolios in the next cabinet expansion in February.
Both Sena and the BJP had parted ways just before the Assembly elections following differences over seat sharing formula.
The last time the two parties ran an alliance government in Maharashtra was in 1995 but the Chief Minister then, Manohar Joshi, belonged to the Sena.
After a month of squabbling over the contours of inclusion in the government, the Sena, in a major climb down agreed to come on board without being granted its desired posts of Deputy CM and Home Minister. The names and portfolios of the Sena ministers will be finalized tonight.
Announcing the decision of a “Mahayuti government, at a joint-press conference, Mr. Fadnavis on Thursday had said that two parties have decided to run the government together keeping in view the mandate of the people.
“To honour the sentiment of the people who want to see the Sena and BJP work together for Maharashtra, we will come together as an alliance. The priority of both the parties is the development of Maharashtra,” Mr. Fadnavis said. The CM also clarified that there would be no deputy CM post in his government.
Though the two parties after failing to agree on seat-sharing chose to contest the assembly polls separately, the ties never broke completely.
Sena's representative in the Modi cabinet, Anant Geete, stayed on and the two parties continued to run the cash rich Mumbai civic body and several other municipalities in the state.
The bargaining strength of the Sena dwindled substantially after the NCP, which has 41 members in an Assembly of 288, extended unsolicited and unconditional support to the BJP government which was short of 23 members for a simple majority.
With the Sena on board, the CM can breathe easy as he faces the winter session of the Assembly beginning on December 8 at Nagpur.
The alliance will extend to the local civic and panchayat bodies as well, Mr. Fadnavis said. It could also pave a way forward for a new poll partnership in the crucial civic body elections in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation elections due in 2017. To hammer out the seat distribution modalities for the municipal and zila panchayat polls due next year, the CM said a fresh coordination committee would be constituted. “Principally, for now we have agreed that the alliance will be extended to those elections as well,” he said.
With a combined strength of 185 MLAs, (BJP 122 and Sena 63), the government looks stable and will no longer require the “outside” support of the NCP. However, the Sena’s reunion with the BJP comes at a huge cost to its image and it is essentially reduced to a junior partner in the alliance. Not only was it made to swallow its pride, its joining the BJP, sources say, was a desperate measure adopted by Uddhav Thackeray to prevent a rebellion within the party. In its bid to pressure the BJP, the Sena had laid claim to the post of the Leader of the Opposition (LoP) and its legislature party leader was recognised as the LoP. Now both the Congress which has 43 and the NCP with 41 have staked claim for the job.
The Sena leadership was forced to re-think its strategy as a faction of the Sena is opposed to staying in the opposition and many leaders had threatened to jump ship to the BJP. NCP Maharashtra chief questioned the pact between the BJP-Sena hinting that the two parties coming together was a result of a tacit “understanding” between them and not a sudden move.
