New Delhi: The Bombay High Court on Friday allowed the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena faction to hold the annual Dussehra rally in Mumbai’s iconic Shivaji Park.
The rival group, led by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, has lost out, after trying to stake claim on the party’s show of strength which has been held every year since the party’s inception in 1966.
Mumbai’s civic body had, however, denied permission to the two warring factions from holding the rally in Shivaji Park on 5 October.
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on Thursday disallowed the celebrations on the inputs of a senior police officer who fears a law and order situation, a civic official told ThePrint.
Team Thackeray challenged this decision in the Bombay High Court on Friday and won the court’s nod.
The two factions have fought bitterly to be known as the “real Shiv Sena” ever since Eknath Shinde executed a dramatic coup in June and toppled the previous Maha Vikas Aghadi government, a coalition of the Sena, the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress.
His faction now fronts the present government with the Bharatiya Janata Party as the dominant partner – certainly in numbers.
Incidentally, the choice of an alternate venue for the Dussehra rally was the same for both sides – the MMRDA ground in the Bandra Kurla Complex. The Shinde faction, however, beat the Thackeray group in that as they had applied first.
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