Union Minister Narayan Rane claimed on Saturday that four MLAs of the Uddhav Thackeray Shiv Sena faction were in touch with him to join the ruling group-led by Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde. However, he did not take names, news agency PTI reported.
Rane was in Maharashtra’s Pune as part of the Union government’s ‘Rozgar Mela’, under which Prime Minister Narendra Modi handed over appointment letters electronically to government job aspirants, in Delhi.
“From 56 MLAs, there are hardly six to seven left (in the Uddhav Thackeray faction). Those too are on the way out. Four MLAs are in touch with me but I won’t divulge their names,” Rane said, as quoted by PTI.
The union minister said that Uddhav Thackeray is confined to Matoshree (private residence of the Thackerays in Bandra, Mumbai), and that there is no faction of the Sena left.
In June, the Shiv Sena party split into two factions after Shinde and a group of party MLAs rebelled against the former Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government – a coalition of the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Congress.
After more than a week of political drama, the coalition was ousted from power as the Thackeray faction was reduced to a minority in the state Assembly. On June 30, Shinde was sworn in as the CM, and former CM and BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis took oath as the deputy CM.
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Speaking about the ‘Rozgar Mela’, Rane hailed the prime minister for asking various government departments and ministries in June to recruit 10 lakh people on a “mission mode” in the next one and a half years.