The resignation of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Vijay Rupani as Gujarat’s Chief Minister and the process of choosing the next CM was the BJP’s internal matter and no other party’s concern, said Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut on Sunday.
“This [resignation of Mr. Rupani] is their internal matter. The high command of any party which has a majority and which is a national party has the right to change the Chief Minister of a particular State [where the party has power] as they please…earlier, the CMs of Uttarakhand and Karnataka were changed, and now it is Gujarat’s turn,” he said.
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Mr. Raut opined that the change may have been effected by the BJP with an eye on future electoral preparations or some other reason.
“It is their Chief Minister. They have changed him and there is no problem in that…It is not the Sena or any other party’s place to comment. Maharashtra has Uddhav Thackeray as the CM and he will remain here as long as the public wishes, and so will Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal and M.K. Stalin in Tamil Nadu…we [the Sena] are our own masters, they [the BJP] are their theirs’,” remarked the Sena leader.
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Mr. Raut, who is the party’s chief spokesperson and the executive editor of the Sena’s mouthpiece Saamana , further said that the Shiv Sena would be contesting the Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and Goa slated to be held in February 2022.
He informed that the Sena planned to field candidates in around 80-100 seats in the U.P. (which has a 403 member Assembly), while it will contest 20-21 seats in the 40-seat Goa Assembly.
While the Sena had fielded candidates in the 2017 U.P. poll as well, they had clocked up an abysmal performance, with several losing their deposits.
“This time, too, we will be fighting on some seats in U.P. and Goa. We always fight there regardless of whether we win or lose. We plan to contest between 80 to 100 seats in U.P. while [we will contest] 20-21 seats in Goa. Our Goa cadre has been working on these seats since the last five years,” Mr. Raut said.
He said that a plan to form a Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA)-like alliance was on the anvil in Goa given that the Sena had the support of smaller parties there.
Following the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly polls, the Sena had severed ties with its saffron ally, the BJP, over the issue of sharing the chief ministerial post, and forged an alliance with the ideologically opposed Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Congress to forge the MVA in the State.
