DNA Special: Why the Maharashtra government has not fallen yet

The Supreme Court has stayed any process of disqualification of 16 rebel Shiv Sena MLAs. Now, a new chapter of this political fiasco has started in Mumbai, which has action, drama, tragedy and comedy. The comedy is that the number of leaders supporting the Thackeray family in Shiv Sena is decreasing as if till recently the cases of coronavirus in the country were decreasing rapidly. Today, we will tell you why Uddhav Thackeray's government did not fall in Maharashtra even after a week has passed. Rebel MLAs of Shiv Sena may merge with MNS party. Will Maharashtra get a new government from this deal, today we will analyze it too.

What happened in the Supreme Court today?

The Supreme Court had to hear three issues. The first is whether the Deputy Speaker of Maharashtra can disqualify the rebel Shiv Sena MLAs. Second, can he himself reject the no-confidence motion brought against the Deputy Speaker? And third, is it unconstitutional to appoint Ajay Chaudhary as the leader of the legislature party of Shiv Sena in place of Eknath Shinde.

Eknath Shinde's faction had challenged the Maharashtra government in the Supreme Court on all these three issues, on which the court has said in its order that the membership of any rebel Shiv Sena MLA will not be canceled till July 11. And in the meantime, in the next five days, the deputy speaker of Maharashtra and appointed by Shiv Sena.. Ajay Chaudhary, the new legislature party leader, will have to answer on this issue. In short, now the 16 rebel MLAs in Maharashtra, including Eknath Shinde, who were being said to be disqualified, have been put on hold till July 11.

And the second big issue is that the court has asked to ensure the safety of all these rebel MLAs. And the court has also accepted the decision of Y Security given by the Central Government to 16 MLAs as correct. In fact, Shiv Sena leaders are accusing Sanjay Raut of instigating party workers. And yesterday, in one of his statements, he had called the rebel Shiv Sena MLAs living corpses and said that the bodies of these MLAs will come directly to Mumbai from Guwahati, which they will send to the assembly for post-mortem. After this statement of Sanjay Raut, an atmosphere of violence is being created in Maharashtra. In Pune, Shiv Sena workers ransacked the office of the rebel MLAs.

READ | Can Eknath Shinde group really get the original Shiv Sena symbol?

Anti Defection Law Act

In order to stop the politics of anti-defection in India, in the year 1985, the then government of Rajiv Gandhi enacted the Anti Defection Law Act. And initially two provisions were clarified in this law. The first provision was that, if two-thirds of the legislators of a party rebelled, they would have the right to merge with another party. And the second provision was that, if the number of rebel MLAs is one-third, then they can form a separate faction of their own by staying in the party. That is, in this case there could be two factions in a party.

But in the year 2003, this law was amended and the second provision was abolished forever. And thus now the membership of the rebel MLAs can survive only when their number is two-thirds. And Eknath Shinde claims that he currently has the support of 48 MLAs. In which including Eknath Shinde, Shiv Sena has a total of 39 MLAs and 9 MLAs are independent.

The total number of MLAs of Shiv Sena is 55 and according to this, two-thirds of the number of MLAs is 36. This means that Eknath Shinde has more than two-thirds MLAs and if these MLAs stay with him, he will save his membership.

And in such a case, under the Anti Defection Law, they will have the option of merging with any other party. That is, they cannot form their own separate faction by collaborating with these MLAs. Rather they have to join some other party. And this party can be Raj Thackeray's MNS.

We have learned that Eknath Shinde is contemplating to merge with the rebel MLAs into MNS. And if this happens, then the political game of Maharashtra will be very complicated. Because in such a situation BJP will have to form an alliance with MNS to form the government.

However, Eknath Shinde has implicated Shiv Sena by saying that he will not choose the path of merger. Rather, he is laying his claim on Shiv Sena itself. And the same thing has also been said by the rebel Shiv Sena MLA Deepak Vasant Kesarkar.

Eknath Shinde may be staking his claim on Shiv Sena. But before this, whenever such a political crisis has deepened in any state, then the rebel MLAs have always chosen the option of merger.

In the year 2019, two-thirds of Congress MLAs in Goa had turned against the party. And after that these MLAs merged with BJP. Similarly, in 2019 itself, 10 out of 15 MLAs from Sikkim's regional party, the Sikkim Democratic Front, had joined the BJP, making the BJP the single largest party in Sikkim. And now there is NDA government in Sikkim. Apart from this, in 2019 itself, 6 BSP MLAs had joined the Congress in Rajasthan. And there was no threat to the membership of these MLAs.

In the midst of this political crisis, a question is constantly being asked that why the government has not fallen in Maharashtra despite the rebellion of Eknath Shinde and why did Uddhav Thackeray not resign from the post of Chief Minister? Because a whole week has passed since this political development but Uddhav Thackeray remains in the government and is also holding regular meetings. So the answer to this question is that even though two-third of Shiv Sena MLAs are with Eknath Shinde. But on the organizational front, Uddhav Thackeray still dominates Eknath Shinde.

After the post of president in Shiv Sena, there are a total of 12 big leaders, except for Eknath Shinde, the rest are with Uddhav Thackeray. Apart from this, there are 30 deputy leaders, in which except minister Gulabrao Patil, MLA Tanaji Sawant and Yashwant Jadhav, all other leaders are still supporting Uddhav Thackeray. And all the five secretaries and party spokespersons of Shiv Sena and other political units are also with Uddhav Thackeray. Due to which the ongoing political uproar in Maharashtra is not reaching any conclusion.

The budget is also being considered as a major reason behind this political confrontation. In fact, half of the budget of Maharashtra that was presented for the financial year 2022-23 was allocated to such ministries and departments, which are with the NCP. In the current year, the total budget of Maharashtra is Rs 5,48,000 crore, out of which Rs 3,14,000 crore i.e. 57 percent of the total budget has been allotted to the ministers of NCP quota. Whereas the budget of Rs 1,44,000 crores i.e. 26 percent of the budget has been allotted to the ministers of Congress quota. And only Rs 90,000 crore rupees were given to the ministers of Shiv Sena quota for their ministries and departments. That is, 11 ministers of Shiv Sena got only 17 percent of the total budget. And it was this imbalance that sowed the seeds of rebellion in Shiv Sena. Former Maharashtra Chief Minister and BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis himself had raised questions about the distribution of the budget. And now it is being said that budget allocation could be a big issue at the root of this rebellion.