MUMBAI: Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut on Thursday said the Maharashtra government has followed all the laid-down norms in disallowing governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari to use a state plane for his visit to Dehradun. Rejecting the BJP‘s charge that the government has insulted the governor, Raut told reporters in Delhi that there was no politics involved in the incident.
“We respect the governor. The government has upheld the Constitution…This is what I gather from my conversation with chief minister Uddhav Thackeray,” he said.
“If the governor wants to use the government plane for private work, then there are some rules and had the government violated those rules, it would have been in the dock,” the Sena MP said.
He added that the state government has followed all the procedures laid down by the home ministry regarding the use of official machinery for going to the home state for personal work.
Raut, however, criticised Koshyari over the delay in nomination of 12 names, recommended by the state cabinet, to the Legislative Council from the governor’s quota.
“If you feel insulted over the plane issue, then what about the insult of the cabinet that had recommended the names (for Council nomination) over a year ago?” he asked.
Sources said that Koshyari was scheduled to travel by a state government aircraft to Dehradun in Uttarakhand on Thursday, but permission to use the plane was not granted even as the governor had boarded it.
The governor later took a commercial flight to travel to Dehradun, a statement from the Raj Bhavan said.
The opposition BJP slammed the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government over the incident with former chief minister Devendra Fadnavis accusing the Shiv Sena-led dispensation of insulting the governor.