Late in the evening on February 26, senior leaders and MPs of Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena faction went into a huddle at Varsha, the chief minister’s official residence atop Malabar Hill. They were there to discuss how their party could have the final say in the seat-sharing talks of the saffron grand alliance ahead of Lok Sabha elections. They told Shinde that the party must insist on 18 of the 48 seats. “As we are the official Shiv Sena, we must get what we got last time, 22 seats,” said one of the leaders. “But if the BJP is too adamant, we should not settle for anything less than 18.” The united Sena had won 18 seats in the 2019 elections; of these, 13 went with the Shinde faction, while five remained loyal to Uddhav Thackeray.
The Shinde faction, it is learnt, wants to stake claim on the Ratnagiri-Sindhudurg and Mumbai South seats, currently held by Uddhav loyalists Vinayak Raut and Arvind Sawant. Sena (Shinde) strongman Kiran Samant, elder brother of Minister Uday Samant, is keen to contest in Ratnagiri-Sindhudurg. His hoardings are up in many places across the constituency. The BJP, though, wants Union Minister Narayan Rane to contest from this seat; he was not given a second term in the Rajya Sabha for this reason. Rane himself, however, does not want to contest as he feels age and health are not his allies. However, bowing to the party’s wishes, he had met and requested Shinde to give up his claim on the seat.
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