The Supreme Court of India has decided to hear the plea against the Election Commission by Uddhav Thackeray order which recognised Eknath Shinde faction as the real Shiv Sena and granted them the permission for using the name ‘Shiv Sena’ and the bow and arrow symbol for their party.
The matter was mentioned by Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal on behalf of Uddhav faction in front of the Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud, for urgent listing.
The CJI then agreed to hear it tomorrow.
The Election Commission had passed an order on a plea by the Shinde faction for the decision on which is the real Shiv Sena the Shinde camp or the Thackeray camp.
In its order the ECI said that the party name ‘Shiv Sena’ and the party symbol ‘bow and arrow’ will be retained by the petitioner faction (Shinde).
The ECI had come up with the decision on the basis of the strength of the legislative wing of the party instead of the relying on test of organizational wing.
The ECI said that could not come to any satisfactory conclusion because the latest Constitution of the party was not on record.
The ECI had claimed that the respective claims of numerical majority in organizational wing by both factions is not satisfactory.
Thus they had to proceeded with relying on the test of majority in the legislative wing.
The Shinde had 40 MLAs as against the Thackeray faction’s which had 15 MLAs in the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly.
In the Lok Sabha too, out of 18 Members of Parliament, 13 were in support of Shinde faction, while only 5 were in support of Thackeray faction.
The ECI based on this had ruled in favour of Shinde faction,giving them the Shiv Sena name and the bow and arrow symbol to retain.
The case has its genesis in the split of the Shiv Sena political party into two factions, one led by Thackeray and the other by Shinde, who went on to replace Thackeray as Maharashtra’s Chief Minister after the split in June 2022.
Both the factions of Shiv Sena had claimed their rights to the party name of Shiv Sena and its symbol.
A batch of another set of petitions is also pending before the top court in relation to the political crisis of 2022 which had led to a change in power in the Western State.
The Court in that case is considering various issues including powers of the Governor of a State and speaker of a legislative assembly and the scope of speaker’s role to initiate disqualification proceedings against MLAs.