New Delhi:
The next Chief Minister of Maharashtra will be from the Bharatiya Janata Party, and s/he will be backed by two deputies drawn, most likely, from Eknath Shinde‘s Shiv Sena faction, and that of Ajit Pawar‘s Nationalist Congress Party, sources told NDTV Wednesday evening.
The arrangement mirrors the deal three had leading up to this election, except the BJP has the upper hand now – after a dominant victory last week. The saffron party thumped the Maha Vikas Aghadi, the rival alliance of the Congress and the Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar factions of the Sena and NCP, winning 132 (of 288) Assembly seats on its own and 235 with its allies.
While the new Chief Minister has not yet been named, the smart money appears to be on the BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis, who held the post between 2014 and 2019, and for few days again in November, following the 2019 Assembly election, after Ajit …