@the_news_21
Pune: Dismissing all speculation of a possible change of guard in the state Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief in Maharashtra, BJP president Chandrakant Patil on Sunday remarked that his party was the only one among all political parties where internal democratic rules were scrupulously adhered to and where leaders in all posts were newly appointed every three years as stipulated.
“There is no question or any discussion (within the party) of a change in the State president’s post… Such baseless talk has only surfaced in the media. In fact, the media has not really known what the BJP is about, and even common people must understand our party…it is the only party which functions in a democratic fashion,” said Patil.
He further said that it was only in the BJP that leaders – right from the grassroots level (the booth president) to the national level (national president) – were changed every three years as mandated by the party’s constitution.
Taking pot-shots at the Congress, Patil said that the party had not been able to elect its national president for more than a year now.
Patil, along with other BJP leaders from Maharashtra, have been in Delhi to meet the newly appointed cabinet ministers from the State including Union Minister for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, Narayan Rane.
“There is no political agenda behind this meeting. Since it was the first time when so many leaders from Maharashtra are part of the cabinet, we decided to congratulate them personally in Delhi and get to understand their newly assigned portfolios and how they could be used for the benefit of Maharashtra’s people,” further remarked Patil.
Speculation has been rife in a section of the media that Patil was likely to be shunted out as the BJP state president had surfaced prominently in the Shiv Sena’s mouthpiece Saamana. The Sena mouthpiece argued that suggestions were rife that Chandrashekhar Bawankule, an influential Other Backward Classes (OBC) leader in the State, could succeed Patil keeping in mind the sizeable OBC vote bank in future polls.
“There is no need to take seriously what either the Saamana or Sanjay Raut (Saamana Editor and chief Sena spokesperson) says regarding our internal matters,” Patil said.
Likewise, Rane, too, refuted speculation of any change in the Maharashtra BJP chief’s post, drily remarking that as Saamana had nothing to offer the public regarding the achievements of Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray’s tripartite Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government, it was meddling in other parties’ affairs.
“As Raut as nothing to give in the Saamana regarding the performance of his own party, he is spreading such rumors,” remarked Rane, a former Shiv Sainik who later became the most vocal critic of Thackeray and the Shiv Sena.
