Mumbai: The Shiv Sena on Tuesday ended it’s long standing alliance with the BJP after they announced that they will contest the 2019 elections alone.
The decision was taken during the paty’s National Executive Meet in Mumbai.
The party, last year, for the first time had contested the municipal elections alone and managed to retain the country’s richest municipal body, the BMC. The BJP settled for the second spot but did not claim the mayor’s chair.
Meanwhile, Yuva Sena president Aaditya Thackeray was elevated to the top tier of Shiv Sena’s leadership after he was made a member of the party’s National Executive.
Shiv Sena minister Eknath Shinde, MPs Chandrakant Kaire, Anant Geere and Anatrao Adsul were also elevated as leaders of the party, taking the number of designated leaders to 13.
Currently, apart from veterans like Manohar Joshi, Sudhir Joshi, Subhash Desai, Diwakar Raote, four others are holding the posts of Sena leaders.
In December last year, Aaditya had announced that the Shiv Sena will go national.
“Firstly, we are going national. As we fought elections in Gujarat and Goa, we will fight elections in Rajasthan next year and (in) Madhya Pradesh. In UP, Bihar and Kashmir, we have received a good number of votes. We may contest in Kerala too,” he had said in an interview to The Indian Express.
