Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and several other ministers along with their families on Saturday visited Guwahati to pay obeisance to Goddess Kamakhya.
Their short trip to the northeastern state comes five months after Shinde along with a group of Shiv Sena MLAs and Independent legislators stayed at a hotel in Guwahati for a week from June 22-29 before toppling the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government in the western state.
“The Maharashtra chief minister, several ministers, MLAs and their family members landed at the Lokpriya Gopinath Bordoloi International Airport in separate flights, including a chartered one,” a police officer said.
“As far as we know, they are here to pay obeisance at Kamakhya temple. They will spend the night at a private hotel and return tomorrow,” he said.
It is the same hotel where the then rebel MLAs had stayed in June. A member of the entourage told reporters at the airport that the then rebel MLAs in June had a ‘darshan’ of Goddess Kamakhya and prayed to her for success.
“The ‘devi’ heard our prayers and Shinde Ji became the chief minister,” he said.
Shinde, in a bid to topple the Uddhav Thackeray-led MVA government in Maharashtra, had reached Guwahati, around 2,700 km from Mumbai along with dissident Shiv Sena MLAs and some Independent legislators on June 22.
They stayed at a private hotel till June 29, when they flew to Goa and went to Mumbai later. Shinde was sworn in as the chief minister of Maharashtra in July with the support of the MLAs with whom he had spent a week in the capital of Assam, where BJP headed by Himanta Biswa Sarma is in power.
