The Maharashtra speaker Rahul Narwekar’s decision that the Eknath Shinde part of Shiv Sena is the true Shiv Sena and that the disqualification petitions against Eknath Shinde and 38 MLAs were dismissed has been challenged in the Supreme Court by the Uddhav Thackeray faction of Shiv Sena. Both the Uddhav Thackeray faction’s and the Shinde faction’s disqualification petitions against MLAs of the Shinde faction, as well as the latter’s against the former, were rejected by the speaker.
With the backing of the BJP and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) group led by Ajit Pawar, this verdict essentially ensured that the Shinde side would continue to hold power in the state. The Thackeray camp has now challenged this before the Supreme Court. Sunil Prabhu resigned as the party whip when Speaker Narwekar, in his ruling on January 10, highlighted that the Shinde faction had a majority of 37 out of 55 MLAs when the opposing groups arose in June 2022.
“A review of the WhatsApp message reveals that it was sent at 12.31 am in relation to a 12.30 pm meeting. The notice of the meeting was never given to any of the members of the Shinde group. Their request for disqualification could be turned down. The speaker declared, “The petitioner’s argument that they risk being disqualified must be dismissed.
Additionally, he decided that Eknath Shinde was the rightfully named leader of the party and Bharat Gogavale was the rightfully selected whip. When competing groupings surfaced, the Shinde faction held a commanding majority of 37 out of 55 MLAs. With the emergence of the rival faction, Sunil Prabhu was no longer the party’s legitimate whip. The Speaker had declared that Bharat Gogavale and Eknath Shinde, the Shiv Sena Party’s whip and leader, respectively, had been duly appointed. Furthermore, the speaker declared that expressing disagreements outside of the legislature and abstaining from party gatherings are matters of party.
The 34 applications that the two opposing Shiv Sena groups filed against one another to have 54 Assembly members disqualified were the subject of Narwekar’s decision. The party separated in June 2022, which gave rise to the petitions. Before splitting and rising to power under Eknath Shinde in coalition with the BJP and the Ajit Pawar wing of the NCP, the Shiv Sena, led by Uddhav Thackeray, was in charge of the state in alliance with the Congress and the NCP (known as the Maha Vikas Aghadi).
The grounds for the disqualification petition were that the members of both factions had disobeyed the Chief Whip’s (the person in charge of coordinating the party’s participation in parliamentary proceedings) directives. After a Supreme Court Constitution Bench declared in May 2023 that the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly has the proper constitutional authority to consider the disqualification petitions within a reasonable length of time, the speaker arrived to hear the petitions for disqualification.
Following accusations brought before the highest court that the Speaker had been holding up the proceedings, it subsequently directed the Speaker to make a decision by December 31. The Shiv Sena group led by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde then asserted before the speaker that his MLAs never received a whip because one had never been issued. Therefore, the whip was not broken. The faction further stated that their withdrawal from the Maha Vikas Aghadi alliance was due to their dissatisfaction with the alliance. The act of entering the government did not constitute a disqualification-inducing violation of the legislative rules. A group of Shiv Sena led by former chief minister Uddhav Thackeray claimed that the rebels did not voice their disapproval when the Maha Vikas Aghadi was formed in coalition with the Congress and NCP.
