Shiv Sena has strongly rejected former chief minister Prithviraj Chavan's statement that he Shiv Sena had proposed to form a coalition government with his party and the NCP after the 2014 assembly election to stop the Bharatiya Janata Party from coming to power in the state. Transport Minister Anil Parab said he was not aware of any proposal as he was not privy to the meeting that Chavan was referring. ''I am not aware of any such proposal. Chavan can clarify on this issue.'' he noted.
Even after the assembly election in 2019, Congress chief Sonia Gandhi was not ready for a coalition with the Uddhav Thackeray-led Sena but she relented after long deliberations, Chavan said in an interview with PTI. He said, “A similar situation emerged in 2014 as well. Then too, Shiv Sena and NCP had approached me to form a coalition government to stop the BJP. I immediately rejected the offer then and said winning and losing is normal in politics. In the past too, we lost elections and sat in the opposition.”
On its part, the Congress party preferred not to either support or deny Chavan's revealation. Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee spokesman Sachin Sawant told FPJ,'' Chavan was the Chief Minister when the assembly elections were held in 2014. He is therefore better person to tell what transpired between two parties.''
NCP spokesperson and Maharashtra minister Nawab Malik, said that the Congress may have been in talks with the Sena but not the NCP. ''Congress is a different party, they might have been in talk with Shiv Sena. But there was no such proposal given to NCP. It was not discussed," he said.
In 2014, BJP and Shiv Sena fought the Maharashtra polls without an alliance, so did Congress and NCP. After the elections, BJP ran the government but later Shiv Sena also joined it. However, even before the counting was voer, NCP had declared an outside support to BJP in the larger interest of development and to avoid fresh election.
