On July 3, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Rahul Narwekar was elected as the speaker of the Maharashtra Assembly. Narwekar got 164 out of the total 288 votes. The voting was done by a headcount instead of ballot voting. During the process, every member of the Legislative assembly spoke up his/her name and number in support of the candidate.
Interestingly, Samajwadi Party and All India Majlis e Ittihadul Muslimin (AIMIM) abstained from voting during this process. Samajwadi Party has two MLAs in the assembly, while AIMIM has one MLA.
BJP has 106 MLAs in the house. It is supported by 7 other independent MLAs. Eknath Shinde camp has 49 MLAs in the house, out of which 39 are ‘rebel’ Shiv Sena MLAs. Hitendra Thakur, Bahujan Vikas Aghadi MLA from Vasai, and MNS MLA Raju Patil also voted for Rahul Narwekar. Maha Vikas Aghadi candidate Rajan Salvi secured 107 votes.
Out of 288 MLAs in the Maharashtra state assembly, Nawab Malik and Anil Deshmukh of the Nationalist Congress Party are currently in jail so they didn’t appear for voting while one Shiv Sena MLA passed away recently. This reduced the assembly to 285 members. Out of the MLAs present in the house, 164 voted for Rahul Narwekar, 107 voted for Rajan Salvi while 3 of them abstained.
Rahul Narvekar is Bharatiya Janata Party’s MLA from the Colaba constituency in Mumbai. Before joining BJP, he was part of Shiv Sena for 15 years and NCP for around five years. In 2019, he joined BJP just before the state elections.
45-years-old Narvekar comes from a political family. His father, Suresh Narvekar, was a municipal councilor from Colaba, and his brother Makarand Narvekar is currently serving as a municipal councilor from the same seat. His father-in-law Ramraje Naik-Nimbalkar is an NCP leader. He is currently serving as chairman and speaker of the Maharashtra Legislative Council. In the 2019 state elections, he won the assembly seat with a margin of over 15,000 votes and defeated Ashok Jagtap of Congress.
