Former Congressman and Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan’s entry into the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has dampened Union Minister Narayan Rane’s chances of being sent to the Rajya Sabha for a second term. However, reports suggest that the BJP may field Mr. Rane in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls from Maharashtra’s Konkan region.
Sources on Tuesday said that Mr. Chavan would be nominated by the BJP for one (of the three) Rajya Sabha seats in Maharashtra that the BJP will be staking a claim on. With 104 MLAs, the BJP has the numbers to easily win three of the Stae’s six Upper House seats, which go to the polls on February 27.
According to a senior BJP leader, Mr. Chavan was likely to file his nomination on February 14.
Speaking to The Hindu on condition of anonymity, he further said the party was planning to field Union Ministers like Mr. Rane and Piyush Goyal, whose Rajya Sabha terms were ending, in the Lok Sabha fray.
Sources also said that soon after Mr. Chavan’s entry into the BJP, Mr. Rane came to meet with Deputy Chief Minister and Maharashtra BJP leader Devendra Fadnavis at the Sahyadri guest house in Mumbai.
While it is unclear how the BJP will accommodate Mr. Rane in the wake of Mr. Chavan’s entry, it appears that the Minister of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) is being primed as a candidate for the key Ratnagiri-Sindhudurg Lok Sabha seat in the Konkan region.
The seat is currently being held by Uddhav Thackeray loyalist Vinayak Raut, one of the handful of MPs to remain with Mr. Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT) faction.
Maharashtra’s political vicissitudes have now brought Mr. Rane and Mr. Chavan — bitter rivals during their time in the Congress — on the same side again. When Mr. Rane severed his over-a-decade-long association with the Congress in September 2017, he launched into a diatribe against Mr. Chavan, who was then the Maharashtra Congress chief.
He had described how he was overlooked for the post of Maharashtra Chief Minister no less than four times, despite repeated assurances from top Congress leaders like Ahmed Patel that he would get it.
Mr. Rane, the once stalwart Shiv Sena strongman-turned-Congressman, who ruled his fiefdom of Kudal in Sindhudurg district for six terms as MLA, was trounced comprehensively by the Sena’s Vaibhav Naik in the 2014 Maharashtra Assembly elections.
Since then, his political fortunes within the party have steadily been on the wane, marred by bickering and wrangling.
After leaving the Congress, his entry into the BJP was not exactly smooth.
It was hoped that Mr. Rane’s adhesion to the BJP would help the saffron party expand in the Konkan where it is weak. However, the plans came a cropper in the 2019 Assembly election which saw Mr. Thackeray’s undivided Shiv Sena effortlessly retain nine of the 14 Assembly segments in the three crucial districts of the Konkan region, with Mr. Rane failing to bring gains for the BJP.
Despite this, the BJP still sees the Rane clan as the potential challenger to Sena (UBT) in the Konkan, given the intense personal acrimony between Mr. Rane and Mr. Thackeray.
