A group of businessmen and prominent persons from different walks of life has launched a forum — Majhi Chalwal, me Maharashtracha (My movement, I belong to Maharashtra) — for this.
Amid whispers that the Shiv Sena and its arch rival Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) may bury the hatchet to stave off being pushed to the fringes of the state’s polity, many influential Maharashtrians have launched an initiative to bring the parties closer.
A group of businessmen and prominent persons from different walks of life has launched a forum — Majhi Chalwal, me Maharashtracha (My movement, I belong to Maharashtra) — for this. Its first meeting was held in Worli on Sunday to chalk out strategies to reduce the bitterness between Sena executive president Uddhav Thackeray and his estranged cousin and MNS chief Raj Thackeray.
None of the forum’s members has met Uddhav or Raj. They want to create public pressure to force the Thackerays join hands.
“We want to build a powerful pressure group of Maharashtra-loving people who can exert pressure on the Sena and the MNS to bury differences. Non-Maharashtrians may also become a part of the group. We have prepared a seven-month plan to achieve our goal,” Satish Walanju, the forum’s spokesperson said.
“To begin with, we will launch a whisper campaign and ask people to spread the word about unity. After that, we will send text messages to people, and put up hoardings and banners to make people aware about our campaign.
Finally, we will hold a rally and urge the two parties to join hands,” he said.
The Sena’s debacle in the last year’s Lok Sabha and state assembly election prompted Walanju, a hard-core Shiv Sainik, and his colleagues to launch such a campaign. “The Sena could not reach to the power in the assembly because it lost around 52 seats due to division in the Maharashtrians’ votes. We contacted around 2,000 people in last six months to know their opinion about the division in the votes. Most of them were of the opinion that Sena and MNS should come together,” Walanju said.
Apart from Walanju, Shashi Sawant, Yogendra Chemburkar, Pritam Mantri, Arvind Pawaskar, Deepak Bhosale and Prakash Kanade are the other founder members of the forum. They have decided to take the number of the forum’s members to at least 700 in first phase.
“We have a budget of around Rs35 lakh to run the campaign successfully. We will ask members to donate Rs5,000 each by cheque to meet the expenses. Once the campaign is over, we will disclose the details of the expenditure,” Walanju said.
No luck with earlier efforts
This is not the first time that someone is trying to bring Uddhav and Raj close. Earlier, senior leader Manohar Joshi, BJP president Nitin Gadkari, historian Babasaheb Purandare and senior journalist Neelkanth Khadilkar also tried their best but to no avail. Raj once had made an appeal that all should come together to make Marathi language and culture richer but his call did not receive any response.
Whispering began since Ambernath election
The whispering about the Sena and the MNS coming closer began after the MNS supported Sena candidate in the presidential election of Ambernath municipal council last week.
Following that, Uddhav presented Raj with his first-ever book, a collection of photos of forts in the state taken by him, and Raj returned the friendly gesture by saying Uddhav is a superb photographer.
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