Amid swirling speculation of a fresh split in the Shiv Sena (UBT), three of the party's Lok Sabha MPs — Sanjay Raut, Anil Desai and Arvind Sawant — on Wednesday met Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla and submitted a letter, in a move seen as an attempt to pre-empt any bid by rebel MPs to stake claim to the party's parliamentary wing.
The meeting came hours after Raut alleged that attempts were under way to engineer another split in the Uddhav Thackeray-led party and claimed that Maharashtra MPs were being lured with large sums of money to switch sides.
