Maharashtra Urban Development Minister and Shiv Sena leader Eknath Shinde, along with 11 party MLAs who are said to be loyal to him, have been out of reach since Monday evening amid the political fallout of the ruling Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress’s defeat in the MLC polls.
Shinde and other MLAs are said to be hiding in a five-star hotel in Surat, Gujarat.
Sources said they took a chartered flight to the city at 7 pm on Monday.
The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Monday won all five of the 10 seats in the state legislative council election, while Congress candidate and Dalit leader Chandrakant Handor lost, before giving the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi a single post-Rajya Sabha election. And there was a blow. this month.
Who is Shinde?
Shinde was elected to the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly for four consecutive terms – 2004, 2009, 2014 and 2019.
Shinde was elected as the Leader of the Opposition in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly after the Shiv Sena broke away from the BJP in 2014.
He was named Cabinet Minister for Urban Development and Public Works (Public Undertakings) at the time of formation of Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi Administration.
As soon as CM Uddhav Thackeray went for surgery in 2021, there were reports that Shinde would take over the interim charge of the top post. Shinde denied this.
Last year, in an attack on Thackeray, BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis had said, “This is a dishonest government and I think respected Uddhavji should now admit that he had an ambition to become the chief minister which he fulfilled. It is not wrong to have ambition in politics. But if you wanted to keep your word, you could have made senior Shiv Sena leaders Diwakar Raote, Subhash Desai or Eknath Shinde the chief minister,” Fadnavis had said.
He had recently gone to Ayodhya with minister and Thackeray’s son Aditya.
Shinde has influence in some satellite cities of Mumbai, such as Thane and Kalyan.
According to reports, he started his early career as a laborer and had to drop out of studies to support his family.
Working oddly, he was influenced by Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray and Sena’s Thane district chief Anand Dighe and joined the party in the 1980s.
His son Shrikant Shinde is an MP from Kalyan.
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