Nagpur: Shiv Sena (UBT) MP Sanjay Raut on Wednesday likened deputy chief minister Eknath Shinde‘s Delhi visit with six defected MPs to a thief showing off stolen goods to the Union home minister and seeking a reward.“I don’t know whether there’s law and order in this country. Shinde roams Delhi’s streets with stolen goods and the law doesn’t arrest him. He takes the stolen goods to the home minister. This is a serious crime,” Raut said.Shinde flew to Delhi on Tuesday evening with MPs who switched from Sena (UBT) to his Shiv Sena in what was termed ‘Operation Tiger’, to meet Union home minister Amit Shah amid talk of a Cabinet expansion. Sources say some MPs went with Shinde, while some came separately, but this could not be confirmed.“If an ordinary thief carries stolen goods, police will arrest him. Shinde landed in Delhi from Mumbai with his booty and went to the country’s home minister and showed him the loot.” He said, ‘This is my stolen goods, now give me a reward’. If the home minister endorses that, I’m worried about country’s law and order,” Raut said. It was Shinde’s first Delhi trip since Operation Tiger.The six formally switched over at a Mumbai ceremony on June 22. Their entry took Shinde’s Shiv Sena tally in Lok Sabha to 13, making it a bigger force within BJP-led NDA and fuelling speculation over its share in an expanded Union Cabinet. Talk of reshuffle has centred around whether a bigger Lok Sabha count translates into additional ministerial berths for the party, with one of the six new MPs seen as a strong contender for a minister of state post. While speaking with reporters in Delhi, Maha Dy CM Eknath Shinde expressed confidence the merger of 6 Sena (UBT) MPs with his party will receive the nod from Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla as they have followed all constitutional requirements. “You will know from experience that I never do any half-baked exercise,” he said, in an apparent reminder of his takeover of Shiv Sena from Thackeray by drawing support from a majority of its MLAs and MPs. As the six MPs are two-thirds of the nine MPs aligned to the Uddhav-headed faction, they pass the legal requirement for defection, he added. In democracy, majority carries significance and the Speaker would take an appropriate decision, he said. In a swipe at Thackeray over his “Ram Raksha Andolan” over the embezzlement of donations at the Ram temple in Ayodhya, he said those who could not run their own political party are now trying to pursue politics in the name of Lord Ram. “Those who had imprisoned people reciting Hanuman Chalisa are now projecting themselves as champions of religion,” he said. Shah assured them that these proposals would be taken up in the Union Cabinet meeting and asked party MP Shrikant Shinde to coordinate with other MPs on these matters, he added.
