Presidential poll issue was real agenda of Mungantiwar-Uddhav Thackeray meeting: NCP leader

Mumbai: NCP leader Jayant Patil on Saturday alleged that the “real agenda” behind Maharashtra Finance Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar’s recent meeting with Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray was the upcoming presidential polls and not the GST. “Mungantiwar had met Thackeray to explain to him the GST and its impact on the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). But BJP’s real agenda was not to hurt Shiv Sena as it holds around 25,000 votes in the presidential elections,” Patil said. [caption id=“attachment_3460142” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File Image of Uddhav Thackeray. PTI[/caption] He was speaking during the special session of the Maharashtra Legislature to discuss and ratify the Goods and Services Tax (GST) Bill, 2017. “BJP needs Shiv Sena’s votes for the President’s election, hence it does not want to hurt its sentiments. The meeting was more of political in nature, than it was about GST,” Patil said. “If the state government was keen on explaining the GST (nitty-gritty) to Uddhav Thackeray, it could have called the representatives of 27 municipal corporations and then explained it. There is no need to create any extra-constitutional authority in the state,” Patil said. On the GST rebate to municipal corporations, Patil said, “There should be some performance indicator before the rebate is allowed to the municipal corporations. For instance, the Nagpur Municipal Corporation did not figure in the cleanliness ranking list recently issued by the Centre. It is the hometown of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis…then what went wrong?” Patil also said that the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation, controlled by NCP’s Ganesh Naik, has emerged as the cleanest city. “Naik faced all types of adversaries, but still the NMMC ranked as a clean city,” he said. Navi Mumbai was ranked the eighth cleanest city in India, according to the Swachh Survekshan survey 2017. It is the only city from Maharashtra to make it to the top 10.