Congress should have contested election for Speaker: Rane

Mumbai: Congress leader Narayan Rane today said the party made a mistake by withdrawing its candidate for the Maharashtra Assembly Speaker’s post. “It was wrong….We are in opposition now and there should have been an election for the (Speaker’s) post. The BJP should not have got a walk-over,” Rane said, talking to reporters. BJP’s Haribhau Bagde was elected unopposed as the Speaker.[caption id=“attachment_1787931” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Congress leader Narayan Rane. PTI[/caption] “The party should have stuck to its candidate, even though we do not have the numbers in the house,” he said. About the Bombay High Court’s decision to stay the implementation of the Congress-NCP government’s decision to provide reservations to Marathas and Muslims, Rane said, “If the state government does not approach the Supreme Court, Congress party will. We had weighed all the pros and cons before taking the decision and will stand by it.” Hitting out at BJP for suspending five Congress MLAs on the last day of the special Assembly session, Rane said the saffron party failed to consider the Congress’s decision of withdrawing its candidate for Speaker’s post before suspending its legislators. “We withdrew our candidate as we respect the traditions of our state. We shouldn’t have done that, but still we did. But the BJP ignored all this and ruthlessly got five of our MLAs suspended,” he said. Criticising the former ally NCP, Rane said, “NCP is a compromising party. It will do anything for power. It should declare its support (to the Devendra Fadnavis government) in writing if it indeed wants a stable government.” Rane claimed that the BJP has lost the moral right to run the government. “The CM has no right to claim he runs a majority government. They have lost the argument. This government, which is only an offshoot of the Central government, cannot take decisions independently and hence will not survive for more than two years,” he said. PTI