Mumbai Marathon

BJP, Sena face-off stretches government formation in Maharashtra

- Giridhar Jha

Sharad Pawar, all of 78, has experienced enough rough and tumble of politics to know when the stars are aligned for him; but in his reckoning, this is not such a time. and that is where the political potboiler in Maharashtra takes a new twist. The BJP’s estranged ally, the Shiv Sena, maybe even open to taking the help of old foes, the Congress and NCP to form a new government in the state but Pawar thinks otherwise. and so the drama continues, with barely a couple of days to go for the term of the assembly to expire.

Though the ruling alliance emerged with the largest numbers, with 161 out of the 288 seats in the recently-concluded elections, the Sena has put the spanner in the BJP’s plans for a quick government formation exercise by insisting on a 50:50 power-sharing formula, which it said was promised by the saffron party president Amit Shah before the polls. The BJP, however, has put its foot down and refused to back off. At the root of the Sena’s new-found confidence to take on the big brother is the BJP’s less-than-anticipated performance. So much so that it has even proposed a government without the BJP.