Maharashtra chief minister Eknath Shinde was named as the new Shiv Sena president at the party’s national executive meeting in Mumbai. It was the first national executive meeting after the Election Commission of India (ECI) recognised his faction as the real Shiv Sena and allocated the ‘bow and arrow’ symbol to him. “Today we held a meeting under the leadership of CM Eknath Shinde. Eknath Shinde will be the chief of our Shiv Sena party. We accept him as the leader of Shiv Sena”, ANI quoted Maharashtra Industries Minister Uday Samant as saying. The meeting was attended by the MLAs, MPs and the other Sena leaders who had joined Shinde after he broke away from the party led by former chief minister Uddhav Thackeray. ALSO READ: EC failed to act as neutral arbiter: Uddhav plea in SCShinde’s anointment as the new Sena chief comes a day before the Supreme Court is set to hear a plea by the Uddhav Thackeray faction to restrain Shinde from taking control of Sena’s properties and finances. The two factions have also been battling over control of offices. The Shinde faction MLAs took charge of the Shiv Sena office in the Maharashtra Assembly. The Lok Sabha secretariat has said that the Sena office in the Parliament building in New Delhi had been allotted to the Shinde camp. On Tuesday, the Thackeray faction urged the top court to decide on the disqualification proceedings pending against Shinde and the MLAs belonging to his camp, arguing it would be the only way to uphold the democratic spirit of the constitution.
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The Thackeray camp also questioned the then governor Bhagat Singh Koshiyari’s decision to administer oath to Shinde as the chief minister last year when disqualification proceedings against him and other MLAs were pending before the deputy speaker, PTI reported. On June 30 last year, Koshiyari had invited Shinde to be sworn in as the chief minister with the support of rebel Shiv Sena MLAs and those of the BJP.
