After the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party scored a victory over the ruling tripartite Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government in the Sindhudurg District Cooperative Bank election on Friday, Union Minister Narayan Rane, who was responsible for engineering the win, said his next aim was to install a BJP government in Maharashtra.
Eleven directors of the Bank’s panel, backed by Mr. Rane, emerged victorious as opposed to the eight from the MVA front. However, the win was also significant in the sense that it proved Mr. Rane, the strongman of the Konkan region, could still call the shots in the area.
The win for Mr. Rane comes at a crucial moment after a Sindhudurg court on Thursday had quashed the anticipatory bail plea of Mr. Rane’s son — Kankavli MLA Nitesh Rane — in an attempt to murder case. The younger Rane has been absconding for more than five days now.
Taking a potshot at the Shiv Sena and Mr. Thackeray, the Union Minister said “the people concerned [Sena] will know better as the public would teach them a lesson if a ‘conspiracy’ was again hatched against the Rane family.” “Now, our next target is [to supplant] the current MVA government. The BJP will win all the Lok Sabha seats in the Konkan in the coming general election. The people here will throw out unwanted legislators and MPs,” said Mr. Rane.
‘Politics of malice’
Buoyed by the win, the Maharashtra BJP leadership also hit out at Mr. Thackeray and the Shiv Sena, saying the results were a perfect riposte to the Shiv Sena’s ‘politics of malice’ against the Rane family.
The Sindhudurg police on Wednesday had issued a notice to Narayan Rane to present his MLA son Nitesh before the police in connection with a ‘murder’ case.