Sena: BJP will lose power if they keep misusing authority
MUMBAI: Attacking the relentless deployment of central agencies like the Enforcement Directorate (ED) against ministers of the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government and its leaders, the Shiv Sena warned that if this continued, the central government would lose power for misusing its authority.
Referring to the ED’S raids on Shiv Sena leader and transport minister Anil Parab, an editorial in the Sena mouthpiece Saamana, said on Saturday that the action was prompted by charges that Parab owned a resort at Dapoli in Ratnagiri.
“Parab had claimed with documentary evidence that he is not linked to this resort. Even then, it is evident that Parab is being targeted by the ED and the union environment ministry by claiming that rules have been violated in it,” it added.
The newspaper, which has Shiv Sena president and chief minister Uddhav Thackeray’s wife Rashmi as the editor and Rajya Sabha MP and spokesperson Sanjay Raut as the executive editor, said that Parab had clarified after the raids that the resort belonged to one of his friends. The property was yet to open and hence, there was no question of it discharging sewage into the sea as was being claimed.
“An agency like the ED, which is supposed to investigate financial fraud, is conducting raids on the pretext that sewage water was discharged into the sea. This is a fit case for the intervention of the prime minister. This cannot be called statecraft,” it pointed out.
“If it is a question of the environment or of illegal discharge of sewage, then the ED’S must start a special branch on the banks of the Ganga-yamuna. During the pandemic, it was not sewage water that was flowing in the Ganga, but thousands of rotting dead bodies. This affected human lives and also the ecosystem of the Ganga,” it charged, in a swipe at the Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath regimes for their handling of the pandemic. The editorial questioned why this had not come to the notice of the ED and the environment ministry and further asked whether it would conduct raids against the Adityanath government.