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Uddhav Thackeray was sworn in as the Maharashtra Chief MInister on Thursday.
Mumbai:
The Shiv Sena may have joined hands with the NCP and Congress to form a coalition government in Maharashtra, but if Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray’s clarification in the state assembly on Sunday is anything to go by, it was not at the cost of its support for the Hindutva ideology.
“I am still with the Hindutva ideology and I won’t ever leave it,” news agency ANI quoted Uddhav Thackeray as saying.
The Chief Minister’s statement comes in the wake of claims by the BJP that the Shiv Sena has compromised its core ideology by allying with the Congress-NCP combine. “The Shiv Sena’s Hindutva now rests at the feet of (Congress president) Sonia Gandhi. Everyone is seeing this,” former Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had said at a press conference earlier this week.
Mr Fadnavis also claimed that the alliance between the three parties would act as a three-wheeler that has wheels moving in opposite directions. “It will be a very unstable government because they have huge ideological differences,” he predicted.
The question whether the Shiv Sena had agreed to soften its ideological stand in return for support from the Congress and NCP dominated many a political discussion in the wake of the October 21 assembly elections. During his first press meet after being sworn in as the Chief Minister, Uddhav Thackeray parried a query on whether his party’s decision to tie up with the Congress and NCP amounted to the Shiv Sena accepting secularism. “What does secular mean? It is what’s written in the Constitution,” he asked in return.
Uddhav Thackeray also appeared to reach out to Devendra Fadnavis, who has been elected as the leader of the opposition, in his state assembly address on Sunday. “I have learnt a lot of things from Devendra Fadvanis and I will always be friends with him. In the past five years, I have never betrayed the government,” he said.
However, Uddhav Thackeray’s compliment was not without a well-aimed jab at his former ally. “I won’t call you (Devendra Fadnavis) an ‘opposition leader’, I will instead call you a ‘responsible leader’. If you had been good to us then, all this (BJP-Shiv Sena split) would not have happened,” he said, referring to the BJP’s insistence on not acceding to the Shiv Sena’s demand for rotational chief ministership when they were political allies in the state.
(With inputs from ANI)
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