A day after Eknath Shinde-led party came out with an advertisement pegging him and not Devendra Fadnavis as the most preferred CM, the Shiv Sena went into a damage-control mode on Wednesday. The party released a new advertisement on newspaper with Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and his Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis together waving hands.
The new advertisement seems to be an attempt to rectify what it had projected earlier — “Modi for India, Shinde for Maharashtra” and goes on to add that it is “The Dream Team Loved by All”, hinting at a rift between the Shiv Sena and the BJP.
The fresh advertisement showed a photo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah at the top along with late Shiv Sena supremo Balasaheb Thackeray and late ‘Dharmaveer’ Anand Dighe. Besides, the 'bow and arrow' symbol of the Shiv Sena and 'lotus' of BJP was also prominent.
The relation between the two saffron alliance partners took a sudden dip after the first advertisement appeared on Monday in which neither there was any symbol of the BJP nor any photo of Fadnavis.
While the first advertisement claimed that 26.1 per cent people of Maharashtra prefer Shinde and 23.2 per cent of the people want Fadnavis as the next Chief Minister, the new advertisement said that 49.3 per cent of people wanted the united leadership of Shinde-Fadnavis.
The first advertisement figured photos of all the nine Shiv Sena ministers - Gulabrao Patil, Dada Bhuse, Sanjay Rathod, Sandipan Bhumre, Uday Samant, Prof Tanaji Sawant, Abdul Sattar, Deepak Kesarkar and Shamburaj Desai. The fact that the names of BJP ministers were missing from the advertisement did not go down well with the saffron party.