Is Fadnavis right or the secretary?

Is the chief minister right or the secretary of the Maharashtra Legislature Secretariat? The piquant question is yet to be settled and may well end up in court. Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis is on record saying that since the opposition in the state assembly do not have the required numbers, they cannot have anyone designated as the leader of the opposition. The legislature secretary on the other hand, claims Shiv Sena (UBT), has in writing clarified that no such requirement is prescribed in the rules of the state legislature. Both the statements are in the public domain and remain unrefuted, leaving even legislators puzzled.

The week-long winter session of the state legislature drew to a close on 14 December; and for the first time neither the assembly nor the council had a leader of the Opposition. This was the first time since the state was formed that neither House had a leader of the Opposition, it was pointed out. The clamour from the opposition was ignored by the Speaker Rahul Narvekar and council chairman Ram Shinde.

Fadnavis told the media that in the assembly with a strength of 288, the opposition needed to have at least 29 members or 10 per cent of the strength to be eligible — a rule which exists in the Lok Sabha or the national parliament. In the last assembly election, SS(UBT) won 20 seats, the INC 16 and NCP (Shar ad Pawar) just 10.

Shiv Sena MLA Bhaskar Jadhav, however, claimed that he had a letter from the Secretary to the Maharashtra Legislature stating unequivocally that the 10 per cent requirement was not prescribed in the rules of the legislature. While there has been no leader of the opposition in the assembly since the last election in 2024, there is no LOP in the legislative council too since August, 2025 when the number of opposition members fell below the 10 per cent level.

The Opposition, armed with the letter from the legislature secretary, actually nominated Bhaskar Jadhav in the assembly and Satej Patil of the Congress in the Council as leaders of the Opposition. There was no response, however, from either the speaker or the council chairman. Congress MLA and former leader of the opposition Vijay Waddetiwar was quick to point out that in 1980 BJP had only 14 MLAs and in 1985 only 16 MLAs—and yet BJP was allowed to nominate one of the MLAs as leader of the opposition. LoP is a constitutional position and we never kept it vacant, he added.

The LoP, who enjoys the status and perks of a cabinet minister, has the authority to ask questions and demand information from bureaucrats, pointed out former chief minister Uddhav Thackeray. Even within the House, the LoP has the privilege of raising issues of public interest out of turn and intervene in discussions or ask questions to ministers. He is also statutorily the member of such important committees as the Public Accounts Committee, the Estimates Committee and Public Undertakings Committee. The LoP can also move adjournment motions and no-confidence motions.

The Fadnavis government is scared of giving the opposition the space and the time to raise public issues, alleged Thackeray while explaining the reluctance of the government to have LoPs. In the just-concluded winter session too, the state government refused to answer any question on the atrocities on farmers and women in the state, corruption or crime.

The only business the government was interested in was to get the supplementary budget worth Rs 75,286 crore approved by the assembly and announce populist decisions in view of the local bodies’ and BMC elections in January, 2026, the opposition complained.

Even the sensational case of Ajit Pawar’s son in a Pune land-scam elicited no response from the Fadnavis government during the session, vindicating the opposition’s charge. The silence of the government amounted to giving Parth Pawar a ‘clean chit’, the Opposition alleged.

A mini-assembly election

The long-pending elections for the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and 28 other municipal corporations in the state have finally been scheduled on 15 January, 2026. Elections to the 246 municipalities and 42 Nagar Panchayats were also held earlier on 2 December and the counting is slared for 21 December. Elections have been pending in five municipal corporations have been pending since 2020, in 18 of them including the BMC elections have been due since 2022. With 3.48 crore people eligible to vote in these elections, it is rightly being seen as a mini-assembly poll.

The state election commissioner conceded that an estimated 15 lakh apparently duplicate voters figure in the electoral rolls released so far. As many as 11.50 lakh of them figure in the BMC area alone and they will be marked in the roll with two stars. Holding the election before publishing the final voters’ list amounts to negligence and is an assault on voters’ rights, complained SS(UBT). Both CEO, Maharashtra and the BMC had earlier given the reassurance that the final electoral roll would be issued before elections are announced, reminded SS (UBT) in a letter.

This election is also deemed to be important because the elections will test the strength of the two regional parties, Shiv Sena and the NCP, after they split. The trend of the assembly election was different from the Lok Sabha election and the local bodies’ poll will determine which of the two trends is gaining ground. The elections are also important because the estranged Thackeray cousins, Uddhav and Raj, have come together after nearly two decades. There is a lot of interest in how they fare in the BMC election, especially since the Shiv Sena had controlled BMC for 25 long years. This time it faces a stiff challenge from BJP and the SS (Shinde).

Rifts in the ruling Mahayuti are out in the open over seat sharing. In Pune and Pipri, NCP (Ajit Pawar) will be contesting independently and though BJP and SS (Shinde) will contest as part of the ruling coalition, the tension over seats is no longer a secret. Eknath Shinde’s home turf of Thane too is a bone of contention between the two parties with the BJP keen that Shinde does not get the lion’s share of the seats there.

Officials and administrators were running the municipal bodies without any restraint in the absence of elected commissioners and councillors. This spawned corruption on an unprecedented scale and several skeletons are expected to tumble out of the closet once the elections get over. In Mumbai in particular, there is anger among people at waste of public money, poor construction of roads, flyovers and bridges and handing over precious land parcels to organisations like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Veer Savarkar Charitable Trust.

The stakes are high and the contests promise to be hard-fought and close.