Supreme Court refuses to stay EC order to recognise Eknath Shinde faction as real Shiv Sena

Satya Prakash

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 Eknath Shinde 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 the election commission order. We are entertaining the SLP. We cannot stay the ECI order today,” a Bench led by CJI DY Chandrachud said.

However, it allowed the Uddhav Thackeray 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 in two weeks.

On behalf of the Uddhav Thackeray faction, senior counsel Kapil Sibal urged the Bench to restrain the Chief Minister Eknath Shinde faction from taking over assets and bank accounts of Shiv Sena but the Bench didn’t agree to it.

The Election Commission had on Friday decided to recognise the Eknath Shinde-led faction as the real Shiv Sena and ordered the allocation of the ‘bow and arrow’ election symbol to it. The Commission allowed the Uddhav Thackeray faction to keep the ‘flaming torch’ poll symbol allocated to it till the completion of the assembly by-polls in the state.

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 Thackeray faction had on Tuesday urged the Supreme Court to stay the Election Commission’s order to recognise the Eknath Shinde faction as the official Shiv Sena.

The fight for the Shiv Sena poll symbol reached the Supreme Court on Monday with the Uddhav Thackeray faction moving the Supreme Court challenging the Election Commission’s decision to recognise the Eknath Shinde-led faction as the real Shiv Sena and allocating the ‘bow and arrow’ symbol to it.