Newly elected MLAs of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) alliance walked out during the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly’s oath-taking ceremony. The opposing party claimed that the sweeping win of the Mahayuti coalition was achieved by Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) fraud. However, despite the mass boycott, Samajwadi Party members Abu Asim Azmi and Rais Shaikh attended the proceedings.
The protest took place on the inaugural day of an extraordinary three-day assembly session, the session beginning with the swearing-in of MLAs, election of the Speaker of the assembly, and a successful trust vote. Pro-tem Speaker Kalidas Kolambkar, appointed by Governor CP Radhakrishnan, oversaw the session. The MVA leaders, however, gathered outside the assembly near the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj statue to voice their dissent.
MVAs react to skipping Maharashtra oath-taking ceremony
“We boycotted the ceremony because democracy is being subverted through EVMs,” said Uddhav Thackeray, MVA leader and former chief minister. He claimed the election results didn’t reflect the public’s will but were instead manipulated. Other leaders, such as Nana Patole of Congress and Jitendra Awhad of the NCP voiced similar apprehensions and called for a switch back to ballot paper-based voting.
When MLAs skipped the oath in Maharashtra, the Mahayuti party rejected the charges. Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar appealed to the Opposition to approach the Election Commission or the courts if they have the proof. Beating someone by baseless charges in public doesn’t achieve anything,” Pawar said, legitimating the coalition’s victory.
The Mahayuti alliance, led by the BJP and supported by Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena faction and Pawar’s NCP group, secured 230 of the 288 seats in the recent elections. While Opposition leaders decried the process as undemocratic, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis criticized the MVA for undermining Maharashtra’s democratic institutions with their protest.
This protest follows the MVA’s boycott of the Mahayuti’s grand swearing-in ceremony earlier this week, which was attended by PM Modi and top leaders. Thackeray criticized the coalition’s “weeklong delay in appointing a chief minister, tagging this as an “insult to Maharashtra.
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