Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis visited Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray at the latter’s residence in Mumbai on July 15.
Despite both leaders terming the meeting purely a courtesy call, it has set political mills abuzz given the MNS’ heavy tilt towards the BJP in recent times.
Mr. Fadnavis met the MNS chief, who is recovering from a hip replacement surgery, at the latter’s residence ‘ Shivtirth’ for more than one-and-a-half hours.
“Maharashtra has a political tradition where we maintain relations with each other regardless of parties. After Mr. Thackeray’s operation, many leaders went to meet him. I had even said in the Assembly that I would be meeting him soon… So, if I went to meet him, why should anybody have any problems with it?” Mr. Fadnavis said.
Soon after the new Shiv Sena (Shinde)-BJP government took power after toppling the erstwhile Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government, the MNS chief had recently lavished praise on Mr. Fadnavis in an open letter, commending him for adhering to his party line and accepting the Deputy Chief Minister’s post despite being the frontrunner for the Chief Minister’s post, which went to Sena leader Eknath Shinde.
“His [Raj Thackeray’s] letter was extremely inspiring. There is no need to take any other meaning…I had even called him to say [soon after Raj Thackeray’s letter] that I am trying to find words to match the praise he showered on me,” Mr. Fadnavis had said after the MNS’ chief’s letter.
The meeting between the two leaders assumes significance in the backdrop of the upcoming civic elections.
According to sources, given the MNS’s hobnobbing with the BJP, the latter hopes to make use of Mr. Thackeray’s still extant bases in the Mumbai, Thane, Pune and Nashik civic bodies.
Despite the MNS having just one MLA in the 288-seat Maharashtra legislature, the party has openly backed the BJP in the recently concluded Rajya Sabha and Maharashtra Legislative Council elections, as well as in the Speaker’s election.
Following its rout in the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly election and its general decline in the State’s politics, the MNS had changed its ideological direction by veering towards ‘Hindutva’ politics, signalled by Mr. Thackeray’s adoption of a saffron flag incorporating Chhatrapati Shivaji’s royal seal or ‘ Rajmudra’ in 2020.
Since then, Raj Thackeray’s party has inched ever closer to the BJP in an attempt on the MNS’s part to seize the ‘Hindutva’ space from the Shiv Sena led by his estranged cousin, ex-Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray.
In his speech on the occasion of the Marathi New Year (‘ Gudi Padwa’) in April this year, Mr. Thackeray, continuing with his hard ‘Hindutva’ line, had caused a furore by demanding the MVA remove the loudspeakers before mosques else his MNS party workers would do so by force and play the Hanuman Chalisa in their stead.
This prompted accusations from Uddhav Thackeray, the NCP and the Congress that the MNS was acting as the BJP’s ‘B-team’.
