Jolt to Uddhav Thackeray, Supreme Court refuses to stay Election Commission order

New Delhi, February 22

In a setback to the Uddhav Thackeray faction, the Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to stay the Election Commission’s decision to recognise the Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde-led faction as the real Shiv Sena and hand over the party symbol ‘bow and arrow’ to it.

“The EC order is confined to a symbol. Now, we cannot pass an order to stay it. We are entertaining the SLP,” a Bench led by CJI DY Chandrachud said. However, it allowed the Uddhav faction to continue to be known as Shiv Sena (UBT) with ‘flaming torch’ as its election symbol for bypolls in Chinchwad and Kasba Peth.

The top court asked the Shinde faction to respond to the Uddhav Thackeray faction’s petition and posted the matter for hearing after two weeks. On behalf of the Uddhav faction, senior counsel Kapil Sibal urged the Bench to restrain the Chief Minister Shinde faction from taking over assets and bank accounts of Shiv Sena, but the Bench didn’t agree to it.

As Sibal expressed apprehension that the MLAs belonging to the Uddhav faction might be disqualified, Shinde faction’s counsel said it would not issue any whip or initiate the process to disqualify them in the meantime.

The EC had on Friday decided to recognise the Shinde-led faction as the real Shiv Sena and ordered the allocation of the ‘bow and arrow’ election symbol to it. It also allowed the Uddhav faction to keep the ‘flaming torch’ poll symbol allocated to it till the completion of the Assembly bypolls.

In its detailed order, the poll panel said MLAs backing Shinde got nearly 76 per cent of votes polled in favour of the 55 winning Shiv Sena candidates in the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly polls while the Thackeray faction’s MLAs got merely 23.5 per cent of votes polled in favour of the winning Shiv Sena candidates. Worried about losing control of party funds, the Uddhav faction had on Tuesday urged the Supreme Court to stay the EC’s order to recognise the Shinde faction as the official Shiv Sena.