The Bharatiya Janata Party and the Shiv Sena have reached a seat-sharing agreement for the assembly elections in Maharashtra, to be held on October 21, say reports. Quoting unnamed sources, the NDTV reports that the BJP will contest 144 seats while the Shiv Sena will contest 126 seats. The remaining 18 seats have been allotted to the smaller allies of the NDA.
Sources told the TV channel that the Sena will also get the post of deputy chief minister.
According to the report, the decision came after internal meeting of the BJP earlier on Thursday. The meeting was attended by party chief Amit Shah, working president J.P. Nadda and Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis.
Maharashtra has 288 seats in the lower house of which BJP had won 122 and the Sena 63 in the 2014 assembly election, which they had fought separately.
A few months later, the Uddhav Thackeray-led party joined the government led by Fadnavis, the first BJP chief minister of Maharashtra.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP won 23 of the 48 Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra while the ally Shiv Sena bagged 18 seats.
The saffron allies were locked in an intense negotiation on seat-sharing and a consensus had eluded them till Thursday on how many constituencies each of them would contest.
The Shiv Sena had been insisting on 50:50 division of seats, but the BJP was not amiable to this deal.
