A day after cabinet reshuffle, MVA slams Centre, BJP

Uddhav Thackeray. File Pic

A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi carried out what is considered his biggest-ever Cabinet reshuffle, the ruling Maha Vikas Aghadi allies in Maharashtra, the Shiv Sena, the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress, slammed the Centre and the BJP for the exercise, here on Thursday.

Shiv Sena farmer leader Kishore Tiwari, who has been accorded MoS status, said the new Cabinet constitution makes it clear that the BJP's ideological mentor, the Nagpur-headquartered RSS, is slowly being "nudged out of proximity to power".

"A majority of the ministers in Team Modi now are without RSS roots, many have been imported from different parties, while others with strong RSS links have either been sidelined, cut to size or ejected outright.

"The RSS was not consulted before the reshuffle... The message is out loud and clear that the BJP no longer needs any bosses in Nagpur," Tiwari stated.

State Congress President Nana Patole, who launched a state-wide 10-day long ‘bicycle agitation' protesting against the rising fuel prices, termed the Cabinet rejig as "a mere eyewash intended to hide the failures of the government in the past seven years"

"Not only the ministers, even the Prime Minister needs to be changed now," said Patole, who kicked off the bicycle agitation in Nagpur amid pouring rain while the party's working president Naseem Khan led the protests simultaneously in Mumbai.

Taking a potshot at the BJP, Sena chief Spokesperson and MP Sanjay Raut said that the BJP should thank Sena-NCP for giving it "human resources" to fill up the central berths in the PM's Cabinet.

He said that of the four new ministers inducted in the Cabinet on Wednesday, two Ministers of State are ex-NCP (Kapil Patil and Bharti Pawar), while Cabinet minister Narayan Rane was earlier with the Shiv Sena which made him the Chief Minister before he went to the Congress and then left to float his own party and later joined the BJP in mid-2019.

NCP state President Jayant Patil expressed hopes that Union Minister Amit Shah, who has now been handed the charge of the Cooperation Ministry, would work to give justice to the cooperative and banking sector.

On the PM's reported instructions to his entire team not to move out of New Delhi till August 15, Tiwari wondered what's ‘cooking' in the government, especially after these desperate Cabinet changes, barely months ahead of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections scheduled next year.

"People are wondering whether the BJP will now eye the Constitution, or some such big action... The Cabinet shake-up clearly indicates that the PM is now feeling shaken ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. So they may resort to any face-saving trick to divert public attention," claimed Tiwari.

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