Mumbai: Nearly five months after taking refuge as Shiv Sena rebels in Guwahati, Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and the MLAs in his camp will return to the Assam city on 21 November for a visit to the Kamakhya temple as their prayers at the shrine for formation of a government were fulfilled.
Shinde will visit Guwahati for a day with 39 MLAs.
“While we were in Guwahati and the political situation in Maharashtra was in flux, we had all visited the Kamakhya Devi Mandir. We had prayed that Eknath Shinde should become the next CM of Maharashtra,” Prakash Surve, a Mumbai-based MLA from the Shinde camp, told ThePrint.
“We were all very happy to be together and confident that we will be successful in forming a government on our terms. We have been wanting to thank the goddess for granting our wishes,” he added.
In June, Shinde, a trusted aide of then Maharashtra CM Uddhav Thackeray and a senior leader of the Shiv Sena, broke away from the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government, taking many MLAs along with him. The MVA government comprised the Shiv Sena, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Congress.
The number of MLAs in the Shinde camp kept increasing through the nine-day period, eventually causing the MVA government to fall and drawing a vertical split in the Shiv Sena.
Shinde and the MLAs loyal to him first travelled to Surat, before heading to Guwahati. They then made their way to Goa before heading back to Mumbai to form a government with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with Shinde as CM and Devendra Fadnavis as the Deputy CM.
Gradually, 13 of Shiv Sena’s 19 MPs also pledged their loyalty to Shinde, with the latest being Gajanan Kirtikar, who was a senior leader in the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena faction and a party veteran.
Sources from the Shinde camp, however said, the MPs have so far not been invited for the Kamakhya temple visit.
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