SHAH MEETS FADNAVIS OVER RAJYA SABHA ELECTIONS

Mumbai: Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) leaders from Maharashtra including leader of the opposition Devendra Fadnavis and BJP’s state president Chandrakant Patil met Union Home Minister Amit Shah in New Delhi on Thursday over the forthcoming elections for six Rajya Sabha seats from the state.

According to a senior BJP leader, “The meeting was restricted to the Rajya Sabha elections for the seats from Maharashtra that fall vacant come July 04. Even the BMC (Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation) and other municipal elections that have been deferred to beyond the monsoons in Maharashtra did not figure in (Thursday’s) discussions with Amit Shah.”

The meeting assumes significance in the wake of Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray’s assertion that his party would try to occupy two Rajya Sabha seats. Shiv Sena MP, Sanjay Raut, who is seeking a fresh Rajya Sabha tenure, also indulged in dinner diplomacy with MP Navneet Rana and her MLA husband Ravi Rana on Wednesday before spending most of Thursday afternoon in Ladakh, again during a parliamentary visit with Ravi Rana and his MP wife.

Even the BJP has said while it can comfortably send three members from Maharashtra to the Rajya Sabha, it was keen to leverage its additional votes in the state to wrest a fourth seat in the upper house of Parliament.

It is also reliably learnt that Fadnavis was asked to submit four names for the BJP party high command’s top two--Narendra Modi and Amit Shah—to consider for the forthcoming Rajya Sabha elections. Both the BJP leaders are keeping their cards close to their chest in respect of the voting scheduled for June 10.

This comes in the wake of the independent candidature of Sambhajiraje Chhatrapati. A presidential nominee to the RS by the BJP in 2016, he had initially been promised some votes by NCP Chief Sharad Pawar, which had upset the Shiv Sena that insisted that he should contest on an MVA nomination.