Both camps wary but Narayan Tatu Rane will still be BJP’s booming gun for BMC polls

MUMBAI: Narayan Tatu Rane’s remark against CM Uddhav Thackeray and the MVA’s legal crackdown may fuel a political crisis in Maharashtra and bring the Sena-led MVA into direct confrontation with the Modi government in the coming weeks, said observers.
Recently inducted into the Union cabinet, Rane was put in charge of Jan Ashirwaad yatra, the BJP’s mass contact drive, for Mumbai and Konkan.
Judging from the high-voltage drama that unfolded on Tuesday, Rane will be BJP’s booming gun for the 2022 Mumbai civic polls. The BJP, which is licking its wounds 20 months after Thackeray formed the MVA government with NCP-Congress, is keen on wresting the cash-rich BMC from Sena in the 2022 elections. There were reports that the BJP high command has instructed the party’s state leadership to back Rane to the hilt.
The NCP-Congress may want Thackeray to adhere to legal measures, while the latter may be under pressure from the party rank and file to pursue the Sena’s rough and ready politics to contain Rane, said analysts.
“Rane is paying the Sena in its own coin. Don’t forget Rane is a product of the Sena’s ‘rada’ (street violence, in Sena’s lexicon) culture,” said a state BJP functionary. The BJP may well tap Rane’s resources and organisational skills to weaken Sena’s link with Konkan, which has sustained Sena’s Marathi votebank in Mumbai. A large slice of the city’s Marathi-speaking voters have money order ties with Konkan. Rane was a valuable help to Sena when the party was set to make inroads into the coastal Konkan belt, which once was a Socialist citadel, in the 1990s. Rane belongs to Malwan in the Konkan belt.
But both BJP and Sena seem trapped in their own dilemmas following the Rane bazooka, sources said. The Sena is worried Rane’s political stock would go up following his arrest. On the other hand, if left unchecked, Rane could keep tearing into the Sena in the run-up to the BMC elections. Close Rane friends said he loves fish and a good fight, adding he has for long been nursing ire against Uddhav for disrupting his stint in the Sena.
Equally worried are BJP strategists who think Rane may become a liability because of his penchant to shoot from the hip. He had, they said, made matters hard for state Congress leaders with his verbal attack on the party high command for not having made him CM.