Rejecting the Asaduddin Owaisi-led All India Majlis-E-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM)’s offer to be part of the ruling Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition to form a broad anti-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) front, the Shiv Sena on Sunday alleged that the AIMIM’s offer was part of a BJP ploy to discredit the Sena’s ‘Hindutva’ credentials.
Following a meeting of the Sena leadership and office-bearers at Mumbai’s Sena Bhavan on Sunday ahead of the party’s proposed voter outreach drive, Sena MP and chief spokesperson Sanjay Raut said Maharashtra Chief Minister and Sena president Uddhav Thackeray had categorically refused to let the party have any truck with the Hyderabad-based party.
“Who asked the AIMIM for their free offer? It is part of a ploy on part of the BJP to defame the Sena over its ‘Hindutva credentials’. The Chief Minister has said that the AIMIM is hand in glove with the BJP, which has directed the AIMIM to mislead the people and raise question marks on the Sena’s ‘Hindutva’,” Mr. Raut said.
The Sena has bitterly criticised Mr. Owaisi’s campaign during the Uttar Pradesh election, stating that the AIMIM was nothing but a “behind-the-scenes facilitator” of the BJP.
AIMIM’s State president and Aurangabad MP Imtiaz Jaleel had offered to join hands with the Congress and the NCP, as well as its own estranged ally – the Prakash Ambedkar-led Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA) – to keep the BJP at bay in Maharashtra. Despite reservations on allying with the Sena, Mr. Jaleel nonetheless had said that he would be open for talks with Mr. Thackeray himself.
The Sena shares power with the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) in the ruling MVA coalition.
Ever since its alliance with these two ideologically opposed parties in a bid to keep its erstwhile ally - the BJP - out of power in Maharashtra after the 2019 Assembly election, the Shiv Sena’s relationship with ‘Hindutva’ and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has been ambivalent, with the BJP losing no chance to criticise Mr. Thackeray’s party of having forsaken ‘Hindutva’ ideals.
Stressing that the Sena is and had always remained a ‘Hindutvawadi’ party, Mr. Raut said Mr. Thackeray, during the Sunday meeting, observed that RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat himself had expressed the view a number of times that those who took an anti-Muslim stance were not Hindus.
“The Sena was always Hindutva and will remain so. We will never go with the AIMIM. This move was part of the BJP’s conspiracy… But the Sena is on the alert and we have exposed this move,” he said.
Speaking on the Sena’s proposed voter outreach drive ‘Shiv Sampark Abhiyan’, which is set to begin on March 22, Mr. Raut said the party leaders and activists would fan out across 19 districts in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha and Marathwada regions to wipe out “the misperceptions and poisonous lies” that were being spread by the BJP regarding the Sena.
Attacking the BJP, Mr. Raut said it was the BJP that had opportunistically formed the government with [People’s Democratic Party] leader Mehbooba Mufti in Kashmir and insulted the memory of the Kashmiri Pandits by doing so.
