Chandrashekhar Bawankule, chief of Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) Maharashtra unit, on Wednesday made a huge claim against NCP (SP) leader and former Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh. He accused Deshmukh of hatching conspiracies to trap state minister Girish Mahajan and other BJP leaders are being exposed.
Deshmukh on Wednesday alleged that Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis' "intermediary" asked him to sign affidavits against leaders in the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) to avoid litigation.
"Conspiracies hatched by Anil Deshmukh to trap Girish Mahajan and other BJP leaders are also being exposed. MVA consists of 70-75 people with different mindsets coming together just to win elections. They are creating different schemes to confuse people. They are destroying the social health of Maharashtra. This is a conspiracy to take Maharashtra back in time," he said.
Not only this, the Maharashtra BJP chief also questioned the NCP (SP) leader on his claims that Fadnavis pressured him to take action against senior Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) leaders. He said that when these alleged incidents took place, Deshmukh was the Home Minister of the state.
"The day he was allegedly pressurised by Devendra Fadnavis, why didn't he take action on the same day and file an FIR? He was the Home Minister, can someone easily pressurise the Home Minister? Do people not have brains? These are all lies. A narrative is being created to confuse people" Bawankule said.
The NCP (SP) leader, however, said that he refused to oblige. He claimed that the leaders Fadnavis allegedly wanted to implicate are Shiv Sena (UBT) chief and former CM Uddhav Thackeray, his son Aaditya Thackeray, ex-finance minister Ajit Pawar and then transport minister Anil Parab.
Anil Deshmukh stepped down as the state home minister in April 2021 after the then Mumbai Police Commissioner Param Bir Singh accused him of asking police to collect money from hotel and bar owners in the city.
Meanwhile, Fadnavis, who also held the home portfolio at the time, denied these allegations and called them baseless. Sharpening his attack, Fadnavis said that leaders of his own party have given him multiple audio-visual evidences of Anil Deshmukh's comments about Uddhav Thackeray, Sharad Pawar and Sachin Vaze.
"If false accusations are levelled against me, I will have no choice but to make this evidence public," he said.