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Mumbai, Amid a stalemate over sharing seats in Maharashtra, the Bharatiya Janata Party on Friday said it will send a new proposal to the Shiv Sena after a meeting of its core committee in Mumbai.
The Sena had on Thursday dismissed BJP’s national president Amit Shah’s suggestion for protecting BJP’s self-esteem in sharing seats and snubbed him by asking the ally to take 119 seats as per the old formula.
The BJP rejected the proposal promptly and indicated that the alliance may break if the Sena does not revise the old formula.
The BJP on Friday said it wants its alliance with the Sena to continue but asked the Thackeray-led party to concede the seats it has never won saying even they gave 7 Lok Sabha seats to the Sena.
“We want the 25-year-old alliance between the Shiv Sena and the BJP to continue and the new proposal will be sent to Shiv Sena,” said BJP leader Sudhir Mungantiwar.
“The formula of 119 seats is old now. There are 59 seats which the Sena has not won and 19 seats which BJP has not won in the last 25 years,” Mungantiwar added.
BJP leaders said that they have sacrifices to ensure the alliance with Shiv Sena stays intact but it should not be the one to do so every time.
“Our objective is to remove the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party alliance. We will decide on who will be chief minister after the results.”
Before the BJP meet, Sena hardened its stance further, asserting it will continue to be the senior partner in Maharashtra where its leader will become the chief minister.
“In Maharashtra, Shiv Sena is the party which gives (seats) and not the one that asks (for seats). It was a bigger party in the state and will remain so,” party spokesperson and MP Sanjay Raut was quoted as saying by PTI.
“Shiv Sena had been in Maharashtra politics even before BJP was born. It doesn’t matter whether there is an alliance or not. The chief minister will be be from Shiv Sena.”
Raut told PTI that a meeting of the party’s executive has been called on September 21 which will be attended by all MPs and MLAs where Uddhav Thackeray will announce the final decision on alliance with the BJP.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had to step in on Friday to save the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance of 25 years.
Modi took a note of the situation with his cabinet colleague Nitin Gadkari, a senior BJP leader in Maharashtra, and sent him to Mumbai to meet the state leadership in order to break the deadlock.
The BJP has been demanding an equal share of the state’s 288 assembly seats citing the Lok Sabha polls where it won 23 seats to the Sena’s 18 and suspended talks with its ally last weekend after Uddhav questioned the impact of ‘Modi wave’ in the election.
In 2009, the Sena had contested 169 seats and the BJP 119, winning 44 and 46, respectively.
HT
