MNS chief Raj Thackeray has announced that his party will put its weight behind BJP’s Narendra Modi, giving a shot in the arm to the BJP-led NDA’s poll campaign. He also made it clear that his party will select its candidates for the Lok Sabha polls without any interference, while announcing his first list of seven men who have been mainly pitted against the Shiv Sena and not BJP.
“Thinking about the future of this country, I have decided that my party will support Narendra Modi for the Prime Minister’s job,” Thackeray said on Sunday on the occasion of MNS eighth anniversary.
The decision clearly pleased former BJP President Nitin Gadkari who met Thackeray in Mumbai last week and tried to dissuade him from either fielding candidates against the NDA, or to name only a few candidates.
Shiv Sena, however, was sceptical of Thackeray’s support towards Modi. “On the one hand, MNS is saying that it will support Modi, but on the other, it is trying to cause a split in the traditional vote bank of Shiv Sena. This is nothing but a double standard,” said Sena spokesperson Nilam Gorhe.
Thackeray has decided to field actor-director Mahesh Manjrekar from North-West Mumbai while from South Mumbai, he preferred Bala Nandgaonkar. It has become clear that while expressing his support for BJP, Thackeray has also tried to ensure that Shiv Sena’s – led by his cousin Uddhav Thackeray – wings are clipped.
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