Mumbai: Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan has resigned after his government was reduced to a minority with the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) withdrawing support on Thursday evening.
President’s Rule is expected to be imposed in the state, where elections will be held in less than three weeks.
The NCP had on Thursday announced the end of its 15-year-old alliance with Congress in Maharashtra. It pulled out its 62 MLAs from the Congress-led government of Chavan, whose party had 82 legislators.
The development came a day after Congress announced its first list of candidates for the Maharashtra Assembly elections. With this, both the Congress and the NCP will now contest all the 288 assembly seats separately on October 15.
For the first time in decades, Maharashtra will see a four-cornered contest with the BJP, Shiv Sena, Congress and Nationalist Congress Party, contesting separately.
Earlier on Thursday, Deputy Chief Minister and NCP’s leader in the assembly Ajit Pawar had squarely blamed Chavan for the failure to hammer out an acceptable seat-sharing arrangement to save the alliance.
Pawar had also alleged that this was for the time that a Congress CM had ignored the NCP completely.