Indian PM’s party secures power-sharing deal in country’s richest state

June 30. (EUROPA PRESS) –

The Bharatiya Janata party (the Indian People’s Party or BJP) of the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, will now share power in the state of Maharashtra, the richest in the country, after the resignation of its chief minister, Uddhav Thackeray, representative of the nationalist Shiv Sena party, due to a rebellion by their own deputies.

Thackeray submitted his resignation this past Wednesday night after losing the support of more than half of his bloc in the state Parliament. The rebel deputies reproached him for having moved away from the party’s ultra-nationalist line and now the leader of this split faction, Eknath Shinde, close to Modi’s BJP, will replace him in office.

Everything seems to indicate that Shinde will enter into an immediate alliance with the BJP, with which it shares an ideological line, to share power in what is also the second most populous state in the country, according to the former local head of the BJP in the state. , Devendra Fadnavis.

“The members of our party will receive the opportunity to participate in this Government and we will expand the local Council of Ministers”, Fadnavis made it known at a press conference reported by the ‘Times of India’, hours before Shinde, if everything continues in accordance with the plan, be sworn in this very Thursday.

The Shiv Sena and the BJP thus culminate a natural alliance, in the words of Shinde, who has the support of 50 deputies to become a possible spearhead in Modi’s initiative to encourage investment in a state that contributes to almost one fifth part of the country’s taxes on goods and services as a manufacturing power that it is, and the first contributor to the Gross Domestic Product.