Shiv Sena breaks 29-year-old alliance with BJP, to go solo in 2019 Lok Sabha, Maharashtra Assembly elections

Shiv Sena today decided to end its 29-year-old alliance with the BJP and said it will contest the 2019 Lok Sabha and Maharashtra Assembly elections independent of its ally at the Centre and in the state.

With its eyes set on the 2019 elections, the Shiv Sena’s national executive meeting at Mumbai’s NSCI grounds decided to go solo. “We will fight 2019 Assembly and Lok Sabha elections alone,” said senior Sena MP Sanjay Raut, who had moved the resolution at the party’s national executive meet.

“We had an ideological alliance with the BJP, but in the past three years they have not left one single opportunity to demoralise us,” Raut said.

At the Sena meeting, called on the birth anniversary of founder Balasaheb Thackeray, party chief Uddhav Thackeray also made its agenda for the forthcoming elections clear.

“We will fight elections in every state for the cause of Hindutva. I take this vow today,” Thackeray said, a statement that hardly separates his party from the BJP, whose main plank has also been Hindu nationalism.

In his address, Thackeray also trained his guns on Prime Minister Narendra Modi over his foreign visits. “The Prime Minister calls himself ‘Pant Pradhan’, but all he does is travel abroad.”

“He (Modi) took Israeli PM to Ahmedabad. Why not to Lal Chowk in Srinagar? Why couldn’t he have done a roadshow in Srinagar? Had he hoisted the tricolour at Lal chowk, we would have felt a sense of pride towards our PM,” Uddhav Thackeray said.

At the Sena meeting today, Thackeray’s 27-year-old son Aditya was also named a member of the party’s national executive.

This is the second time in four years that the Shiv Sena has decided to go it alone. In the October 2014 Assembly elections, the Shiv Sena-BJP alliance had broken down and both parties fought the elections independently.

Later, the BJP emerged as the single largest party while the Shiv Sena sat as the main opposition party for a month, and then joined the ruling BJP in December that year.

Shiv Sena mouthpiece Saamana recently published an article on how “Hindustan” is in trouble today.

The editorial said that the rulers today are taking the fruits of power only because of the foundation of Hindutva laid by Balasaheb.

“Balasaheb took the eagle’s stride, rest today we have only pied pipers,” the editorial said.