The Congress will not let the BJP form the government in Maharashtra, party leader Husain Dalwai said on Friday, asserting confidence that his party MLAs would follow the orders of the high command.
“All Congress MLAs are together. No MLA will break away from the party. MLAs will follow what the party high command said. We will not allow BJP to form government in the state. National Congress Party (NCP) is our ally, they are with us. People have voted for us to save Maharashtra," he said in Mumbai.
The assertion comes even as the Congress moved its 44 MLAs to a resort in Rajasthan’s Jaipur amid reports that some of them were offered money to switch sides. Saturday is the deadline for government formation in Maharashtra, with both the BJP and the Shiv Sena refusing to budge on the issue of power sharing.
The BJP and the Shiv Sena are locked in a tug-of-war over the issue of the chief minister's post, resulting in a stalemate in government formation. The Shiv Sena has claimed top leaders of the party and the BJP had "agreed" on sharing the chief minister's post on a rotational basis and 50:50 distribution of portfolio ahead of the October 21 assembly polls in the state. The BJP has, however, denied any such arrangement wit the Uddhav Thackeray-led party and has insisted Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis will continue to hold the post for full term.
In the polls, the BJP won 105 seats, the Shiv Sena-56, the NCP-54 and the Congress 44 in the 288-member house where the simple majority mark is 145.
On Thursday, Thackeray chaired a meeting of Sena's new MLAs for over an hour, during which the legislators reiterated that the "equal sharing of posts and responsibilities" formula agreed upon before the Lok Sabha polls should be implemented.
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