JOIN USMaharashtra must set up welfare office in Belgaum: Sanjay Raut
In what could be a trigger for the flaring up Maharashtra-Karnataka border dispute once again, senior Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut has said that the Maharashtra government must set up an office in Belagavi.
The statement of Raut, the chief spokesperson of Shiv Sena and a Rajya Sabha member came in his weekly column "RokThok" that appeared in Saamana on Sunday.
A close aide of Maharashtra chief minister and Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray, Raut is the executive editor of Saamana.
Last week, Raut had been to Belagavi in Karnataka, where held a roadshow campaigning for Maharashtra Ekikaran Samiti candidate Shubham Shelke in the Belagavi Lok Sabha bypoll.
According to Raut, the office should be set up for the welfare of the Marathi-speaking population of the area.
“(Urban development minister) Eknath Shinde, who is Maharashtra coordination minister for border areas, should make frequent visits there. (State BJP president and then revenue minister) Chandrakant Patil, who was coordination minister in the previous Devendra Fadnavis regime, never visited the disputed border areas,” Raut stated.
He pointed out that 65 years have passed but the issue still remains. “The Maharashtra government should strengthen its stand against Karnataka in the boundary dispute case pending in the Supreme Court, and the state advocate general should meet Marathi-speaking people in the border areas and update them about the case,” he said.
It may be recalled, in January, the Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress Maha Vikas Aghadi government, backed by opposition BJP, has called for a "time-bound resolution" of the issue and urged the Centre to declare the disputed areas as Union Territory till a final solution is reached.