Mumbai: While predicting a thumping victory for the BJP in the Lok Sabha election Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis referred to the opposition alliance as a coming together of jackals, foxes and a parrot.
The Bharat Janata Party (BJP) usually targets Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) as NCP president Sharad Pawar’s parrot.
Speaking at a joint rally of the BJP-Shiv Sena and Republican Party of India-Athawale (RPI) in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Fadnavis said, “There was an election in the jungles. Foxes thought that they would come together with jackals and a parrot. They thought they will win the elections. But they did not know that the lion and tiger have come together. Everyone knows who’s the lion and who’s the tiger,” Fadnavis said.
“If 2014 was a wave, 2019 is a tsunami,” he added and listed out his government’s achievements in the state, like the monorail, metro rail, expansion of suburban railway network, water transport and redevelopment of slums.
Just like development, national security is also an issue for this election, Fadnavis said. “This is the government which will enter others’ houses if they come here and hit us. We are proud of our defence forces. A new India has come into being today.”
Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray said there was a common ideological ground for the BJP and his party to join hands.
“I have never seen (Congress president) Rahul Gandhi and Sharad Pawar together,” Thackeray said in his attack on the opposition alliance.
He said the opposition did not hold a single big rally together. “I want to ask one question. If their hearts can’t come together, can they come together to form a government? See our manifesto and decide who to vote for,” he said.
"Our PM is such that he will hit Pakistan by entering their country. He has already done it,” the Sena chief said and questioned why a Bangladeshi actor was called to campaign for the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal.
Talking of the common programme of both the parties, he said, “We will build a Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. We will bring about development. We will build a Hindu Rashtra.”
“It is our promise that we will scrap Article 370. Should we not hang the ‘tukde tukde’ gang? Or should we give milk to them? (referring to them as snakes),” he said and asked the audience if it agreed with the Sena’s alliance with the saffron party.
As the Sena talked about were the services provided by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation in Mumbai, its minister Subhash Desai took credit for uninterrupted water supply, concession in property tax for houses having less than 500-sqft area.
This was the first joint rally involving top leaders of the Sena and BJP in Mumbai since 2014.
This included all the six candidates of the alliance in the city — Arvind Sawant, Gajanan Kirtikar, Rahul Shewale, Gopal Shetty, Poonam Mahajan and Manoj Kotak.
RPI(A) leader Ramdas Athawale was also present on dais. Union ministers Piyush Goyal and Suresh Prabhu were accompanied by state ministers like Diwakar Raote and Vinod Tawde.
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