Parties with opposite ideologies have joined hands only to grab power: Shah on Maharashtra

Home Minister Amit Shah on Wednesday said political parties with diametrically opposite ideologies have come together only to grab power and have discredited the mandate given by the people of Maharashtra.

Speaking at a function organised by Republic channel, the minister said people voted for a stable government in Maharashtra with pre-poll alliance between his BJP and the Shiv Sena winning people's mandate.

He said moral and ethics have been distorted just to keep the BJP out of power.

"Is it not horse-trading to take support by offering chief minister's position. I am again telling Sonia Gandhi and Sharad Pawar to claim chief minister's post and then take Shiv Sena's support," Shah said.

The minister said the BJP has been accused of horse-trading while the newly formed SS-NCP-INC alliance has stole the entire stable along with the CM's post.

"I again want to make it clear that we had not given any assurance of chief minister's position to Shiv Sena. Even in election rallies, when Aditya and Uddhav Thackeray were on stage we had said Devendra Fadnavis will be chief minister. Why they didn't oppose it then?" he said.

The minister said he was of the firm belief that the people of the country don't get misled by such vote bank politics and they are still with the BJP.

"All MLAs of Shiv Sena have won elections contesting with us. There is not a single MLA of Shiv Sena who had not used cutouts of Narendra Modi. In their assembly seats, they used bigger cutouts of Modi than in seats where the BJP contested. Do people of the country and Maharashtra not know this," he said.

Shah said people have accepted the Modi government's politics of performance over vote bank politics.

They have become mature and discredited decadent issues of family politics and money-muscle power politics, he said.