Congress leaders irked over chiefs gone AWOL
Congress president Sonia Gandhi has asked leader Mohan Prakash to visit Mumbai and submit a report over three party MLAs cross-voting and the absence of 11 MLAs for the floor test. But more Congress leaders who met Mohan Prakash in Mumbai were vocal against the party chiefs, Mumbai’s Bhai Jagtap and state’s Nana Patole. Citing various reasons, they even demanded the chiefs be removed, submitted videos of the Maharashtra Congress president and conveyed that Patole had no time to attend Congress presidents’ meetings in Delhi while being busy in other things.
NCP media outreach hit in the absence of Malik
After the arrest of NCP MLA Nawab Malik, the media wing of NCP got crippled. Malik was skilled in giving bytes against BJP and RSS. The NCP has now asked Mahesh Tapase to lead the show in the former’s absence, but the latter is unable to fill the big gap left by Malik. Tapase has found himself clueless on how to be an effective spokesperson for the top brass of the party. He seems to be not kept in the loop on party affairs. That puts him in murky situations frequently. Recently, NCP leader Praful Patel issued a note dissolving NCP bodies, departments and cells, but Tapase was not aware of the developments.
Babus: Shinde does what Uddhav couldn’t
Former chief minister Uddhav Thackeray could not do it in his 2.5-year tenure, but newly sworn-in Maharashtra CM Eknath Shinde neither waited for Cabinet expansion nor wasted any time to put his favoured babus at key posts in order to rule out any bumpy ride along his tenure. Uddhav gave a long rope to the bureaucracy and did not appoint his own people. However, the new regime has appointed 2010-batch IAS officer Bhushan Gagrani as additional chief secretary to the CM while other officers close to Shinde have been deployed as district collectors.