Shiv Sena plays musical chairs, threatens to skip PM’s event

Mumbai: The Shiv Sena has threatened to boycott Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Mumbai on December 24 unless its leader, Uddhav Thackeray, is given a respectable seat on the dais.

The party claims that Mr Thackeray was allotted a seat on the ground at a 2014 event, instead of on the stage. The Sena has demanded that Mr Thackeray be seated in the same row as Mr Modi and it wants the Sena chief to be accommodated next to the governor or chief minister.

Pratap Sarnaik, a Shiv Sena MLA from Thane, said, “Our demand is very clear and I have voiced the same opinion on the floor during the Winter Session. Our leader was given a seat on the ground during an event in 2014 that was organised by BJP MLA Mangal Prabhat Lodha. We are not asking for protocol to be broken for our leader but at least give a respectable seat in the same row as the governor or chief minister, or we will boycott the event.”

Mr Modi is set to visit the city on Saturday for the foundation stone-laying ceremony of the Shivaji memorial in the Arabian Sea along with that of the 22-km-long Mumbai Trans-Harbour Link (MTHL) and two metro corridors, namely the DN Nagar-Mankhurd Metro-2B corridor and Wadala-Thane Metro-4 corridor. The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA), of which chief minister Devendra Fadnavis is the chairman, is implementing the MTHL and the metro projects.

When asked whether he hadn’t made seating arrangements for Mr Thackeray, Mr Lodha preferred not to comment on the issue and disconnected the call. However, Niranjan Shetty, spokesperson, Mumbai BJP, said, “If we are talking about the event organised by Mr Lodha in 2014, it was a personal programme of his that was organised by an NGO and no political party was involved in the event. Mr Modi’s Saturday event is being organised by the government and the protocol laid down by the general administration department will be followed for the same.”

A senior state government bureaucrat said, “We will follow the protocol that mandates invitation to the governor, chief minister, mayor, MPs and MLAs from the local area where the event is being held and where the project is going to be carried out.” Shiv Sena in its mouthpiece Saamana on Monday had written an editorial firing fresh salvos at the BJP, asking it to keep talks of its vision of development to itself. It had also claimed that Maharashtra belongs to Shivaji and Balasaheb Thackeray, and doesn’t need the BJP’s development vision.

Off late, in the run-up to the BMC polls, Shiv Sena and the BJP have been at loggerheads with a new statement or controversy every other day from poster wars to criticism over demonetisation.