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 be removed from power for misusing its authority.
Referring to the ED’s raids on Shiv Sena leader and Maharashtra 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 several 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 Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi. 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.
Without naming BJP leader Kirit Somaiya, the Sena said that he “issued threats in the name of ED and the CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation) and action took place accordingly,” which created questions about “if these central agencies were puppets in the hands of the BJP regime.” On the other hand, BJP leaders, against whom action was taken by the Maharashtra Police were getting relief from the courts. “If it continues like this, this (BJP-led) government will be swept away like the dead bodies in the Ganga,” the editorial charged, while accusing the union government of vendetta politics.
Meanwhile, speaking to reporters at Kolhapur on Saturday, Sanjay Raut charged that former home minister Anil Deshmukh and incumbent minister Nawab Malik, who belong to the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), had been arrested for political reasons. He added that the raids on Parab were part of vendetta politics.