With an eye on the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation elections, Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde on Thursday said BMC and Brihanmumbai Electricity Supply and Transport (BEST) employees will receive a bonus of Rs 22,500 each ahead of Diwali.
Over 93,000 employees will receive the bonus. BEST employees, BMC officials and teachers/non-teaching staff in schools will receive Rs 22,500 while health workers will receive one month’s salary as a bonus.
The announcement came a week after former chief minister Uddhav Thackeray dared the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) to hold Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation elections and Maharashtra Assembly polls in a month and defeat his outfit.
“Union Home Minister Amit Shah has asked his party (BJP) to show the Shiv Sena its place in the Mumbai civic polls. I dare you to try it. Shiv Sena’s relationship with the city was unbreakable and the party was deeply connected with the day-to-day life of ordinary Mumbaikars, rushing to their help whenever required,” he said.
The Shiv Sena president said be it natural calamities or terror attacks, it is the Shiv Sainik who responds to them first and comes to the aid of people, and not the BJP. “I challenge Amit Shah that if you have guts, hold the BMC polls in a month and also state Assembly elections,” he said.
Asserting a deep link between Shiv Sena and Mumbai, Thackeray said, “Have you (the BJP) even understood Mumbai before thinking of winning it? Before winning the civic body, win the hearts of Mumbaikars which the Shiv Sena has,” said the former CM.
Thackeray said Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Shah, central agencies and the “traitors” (a reference to rebel Sena MLAs led by Chief Minister Shinde), will attack the Shiv Sena from all sides.
“Fight this (BMC) election as your (party workers) first election. Assume that we do not have anything…the civic body, corporators. Consider that the MLAs, MPs who left us lost the polls in the last elections and we have to again wage a new fight,” the Sena leader said.
Thackeray’s scathing remarks against the Union Home Minister were in response to Shah’s statement during a visit to Mumbai earlier this month in which he urged BJP leaders and workers to inflict a “deeper wound” on the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena on its home turf.
Shah, a former BJP president, had slammed Thackeray, saying he compromised on everything to become the CM with the support of the Sharad Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Congress despite seeking votes in the 2019 polls in the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis.
The Shiv Sena has been ruling the Mumbai civic body for almost 30 years. In the 2017 BMC polls, the Shiv Sena won 84 seats, its lowest tally in the 227-member civic body in two decades, while the BJP considerably improved its tally and bagged 82 seats. Currently, the BMC is run by an administrator as the five-year term of the civic body had ended and elections are awaited.
The BJP has also been using events like Ganeshotsav (Ganesh festival) and ‘Marathi katta’ (a place where ideas are exchanged) to woo the Marathi voters ahead of the crucial Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) polls.
(With inputs from PTI)
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